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Debt Rattle February 28 2026

Feb 282026
 
 February 28, 2026  Posted by at 10:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  118 Responses »


Keith Haring Untitled 1983


• Substitution of a Tariff for Income Tax Would Re-create Free Americans (PCR)
• Who Rules America? Not Americans. (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Man Who Might Wreck the Country (James Howard Kunstler)
• ‘I Did Not Have Relations With That Man, Jeffrey Epstein’: Bill Clinton (ZH)
• Hillary: I Didn’t Know Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Was An ‘Acquaintance’ (JTN)
• Hillary Deposition on Epstein Briefly Halted Due to Leaked Photograph (CTH)
• Even CNN Admits Democrats Are in Big Trouble on Immigration (Matt Margolis)
• Brutal: Democrats Walked Straight Into This (ZH)
• Jack Smith’s Secret Orders Targeting Patel and Wiles Should Alarm Us (Turley)
• What Susan Rice Really Meant by Her Retribution Threat (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Kristi Noem Says DHS Staffers Put Spyware on Her Phone and Laptop (AmG)
• Biden Admin ‘Invited’ Fani Willis To Get Lucrative Grant (HUSA)
• Paramount Wins Bidding War For Warner Bros. After Netflix Drops Out (ZH)
• Ukraine Marked This Major Shift In Global Politics (Lukyanov)
• McDonald’s Germany HIDES Food Ads During Ramadan (MN)

 


 

https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/2027641193358594157?s=20 Elon interview Elon interview part Tucker Epstein

 


 

 


 


Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration…

He says, like Trump, but independent of Trump, that tariffs set Americans free. But who’s listening to him? After 100+ years, people can no longer think beyond income tax.

• Substitution of a Tariff for Income Tax Would Re-create Free Americans (PCR)

On February 25, I wrote on this website that the most important part of President Trump s State of the Union address was the refusal of Democrats to stand if they agreed with his statement: the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. Actually, there is an equally important element in his address, perhaps more important, and that is President Trump’s statement that tariffs would eventually replace the system of income taxation. This is perhaps the most important sentence ever stated in a state of the union address. As far as I can tell, the only attention it received was that the Supreme Court had recently invalidated Trump s tariffs.


As I have pointed out for decades to no avail not even libertarians have noticed the income tax enacted in 1913 converted free Americans into serfs or slaves. The reason I can say this is that the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves do not own their own labor. Serfs owed a portion of their labor to their feudal lord. Normally it did not exceed 30% of their labor. Slaves owed 50% of their labor to their owners, the other half of their labor going to their own maintenance as an effective and loyal workforce. There is no way around the fact that the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. The land enclosures freed serfs from their obligation to feudal Lords, and created a labor market in which untaxed wages were paid to laborers for their labor. Free men appeared once they owned their own labor and sold it at market wages.

The income tax that passed in 1913 did not materially enserf or enslave Americans, because the tax rate was so low and applied to such a tiny percentage of incomes that it had no material effect. That is how they got it in place. But once in place, the income tax grew quickly, both up in the tax rate and broadly in the percentage of the population subject to income taxation. By the time of the John F Kennedy administration the tax rate on middle income Americans exceeded the tax rate on the labor of medieval serfs, and the tax rate on upper incomes exceeded the tax rate on 19th century slaves on American cotton and tobacco plantations. As the Kennedy tax rate reductions were not indexed, by the time of the Reagan administration the tax rates again exceeded those on medieval serfs and 19th century slaves.

The Reagan administration indexed the new tax rates, and this has held the appropriation of the labor of the middle class to that appropriated by feudal lords. For the upper income class, the official tax rate is higher than that on medieval serfs, but there are methods depending on the economic activities of the upper income class that keep the tax rates for some of them below that of medieval serfs. Regardless, the upper class does not own all of its own labor and is no more free than the lower class. A tariff is a tax on your purchases, not on your labor. If you purchase domestic products made from domestic resources, you do not have to pay the tariff. If you purchase imported goods or domestic goods made partially from imported products, you pay a tariff based on the content of foreign input in to the product. The purpose of tariffs is to protect domestic production from foreign competition, not as Trump uses them to bludgeon foreign countries to obey his orders.

Tariffs are in effect a consumption tax, not a tax on labor and capital. Therefore, a country with a consumption tax instead of an income tax will have higher growth and higher living standards. All of this completely obvious and correct information has been ignored in the United States since 1913, a period of 113 years. For over a century American GDP and personal incomes have been held down by the liberals and leftists who have the outlook of communists and prefer equal incomes in poverty to higher incomes with inequality.

It is extraordinary that Donald Trump, a real estate developer, understands this, but the American Economic Association is incapable, being brainwashed as it is by a century of indoctrination. When you read economists, you learn that their only concern about the income tax is that it is fair. By fair, they mean that it must fall heaviest on the higher incomes. A flat tax rate that taxes everyone at the same rate, which seems consistent with the Constitutional mandate of equal treatment under the law, is considered unfair. The fact that a tax on income means that the taxpayer has lost his freedom and now owes part of his labor to the government, the equivalent of a feudal lord or 19 century plantation owner, is beyond the comprehension of economists.

The consequence is that we will remain serfs and slaves with only a partial ownership of our own labor.

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“The flooding of its borders by many different immigrants, whose entry was facilitated rather than opposed, has turned the United States into a Tower of Babel in which there is no longer even a common language.”

• Who Rules America? Not Americans. (Paul Craig Roberts)

The Zionist American media such as NPR are blaming US Attorney General Bondi for withholding Epstein files in order to protect President Donald Trump. Here are the charges from NPR, which has no evidence except its alleged “investigation” of documents that NPR claims exist, but which NPR has not seen:“The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump. Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.” https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell


Of course, NPR’s investigatory ability is nonexistent. NPR is a propaganda institution whose agenda is to undermine traditional white America which NPR presents as racist and exploitative. NPR’s charges, like those of the rest of the whore American media that prostitutes itself to serve official narratives, seek to divert focus off investigating whether Epstein was conducting an Israeli Mossad blackmail operation in order to conform American, British, and European foreign policy in the Middle East with Israel’s. Dear reader, have you noticed that absolutely no one wants to investigate the real issue? This very fact tells you how real the issue is. Epstein’s job, for which he was well paid, was to compromise a few highly placed American, British and European officials in positions to influence American, European and British policy in the Middle East and make sure that it was aligned with Israel’s.

That is what the Epstein saga is about. It is being covered up by the US government, the British government and the European governments, all of whom support Israel’s Zionist agenda of Greater Israel. US ambassador to Israel, Huckabee, demonstrated Washington’s support for Greater Israel in his interview with Tucker Carlson when he said that Israel should just go ahead now and take the entire Middle East.mThe power Israel has over America is obvious when it is easier for President Trump to deport a foreign student in America legally present to study at an American university who dares to mention or criticize the Israeli genocide of Palestine than it is for President Trump to deport an immigrant-invader who is here illegally.

The power Israel has over America is obvious. A Christian prayer cannot be said in an American school, but the Republican legislature in Texas can be bribed to pass legislation that makes mandatory the indoctrination of American school students in Texas with Israeli religious and political propaganda. If the Zionist legislation becomes law in Texas, future Texans will grow up indoctrinated as Israelis and not as Americans. And MAGA-Americans think Republicans are our salvation. The United States of America long ago ceased to be an independent country. Indeed it is no longer even a nation. The flooding of its borders by many different immigrants, whose entry was facilitated rather than opposed, has turned the United States into a Tower of Babel in which there is no longer even a common language.

Today the United States is Israel’s military force. The United States destroys countries that are opponents to Israel’s Zionist agenda of Greater Israel, a territory that comprises in its extent the entirety of the Middle East as so many Israeli government officials have publicly made clear over and over and over. Yet it makes no impression on Americans when an Israeli minister holds up on public television for all to see a map that shows that Israel as defined by Israel is the entirety of the Middle East from the Nile to Pakistan. It never occurs to insouciant, indoctrinated American citizens that for a quarter of a century under the guise of “the War on Terror” Americans with their blood and money have been fighting to create Greater Israel for Israel. Instead of recognizing their deception, the Americans chant: “you can’t be an American if you don’t love Israel.” Unfortunately, many Americans do not understand the subservience of American domestic and foreign policy to Israel. Consequently, the United States no longer exists as an independent country. The United States exists as the puppet of Israel, and our president, Donald Trump, is the chief puppet.

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“That a government’s primary responsibility is to its citizens should not be a controversial proposition.” —Coddled Affluent Professional on X

• The Man Who Might Wreck the Country (James Howard Kunstler)

The zeitgeist is a rough beast, hard to ride as it slouches into the unknown. Our country is trying to hang on while a party of goblins vexes and needles the beast from behind, and you cannot make them stop. Sense-making gets to seem impossible. We don’t have an explanation from Senate Majority Leader John Thune as to why he will not do what is within his power to do: pass election reform, known as the SAVE Act, by changing the filibuster procedure. At midweek Sen. Thune said Republicans were “not unified on pursuing a talking filibuster.” Understand that bringing back a real filibuster, with continuous speech in the well of the Senate, only requires the Majority Leader’s say-so, meaning Mr. Thune is prevaricating, concealing the truth.


Which might be that he does not want to pass election reform. It appears he wants to set up the midterm elections with the now-familiar kit of unverifiable mail-in ballots, millions of non-citizen motor-votes, and dragged-out vote-counting so that Democrats will seize control of the House (if not the Senate) in order to crank-up the impeachment machine again and finally get rid of President Trump. It does not look like anything else, certainly not any kind of cunning game. What might change that would be an FBI analysis of the 2020 election year ballots, voter rolls, and vote tabulation tapes recently extracted from the Fulton County, Georgia, Elections Hub, leading to indictments.

They’ve had this mass of material for a month. There was already plenty of preliminary evidence of fraud from earlier investigations — which is how come U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia found probable cause to approve a search warrant for the FBI. They must have an idea by now of what the evidence shows. It’s not that complicated.There’s no fixed statutory timeline for a referral. The FBI can pass along the matter to the DOJ for prosecution whenever they determine the evidence is sufficient. Referrals are customarily secret, as they occur during ongoing investigations and involve sensitive, non-public information. DOJ policies emphasize confidentiality in pre-charging stages to protect investigations, potential witnesses, sources, and the integrity of any future prosecution.

In general, the public learns of an FBI referral only indirectly — through later developments like indictments, or news media reporting via “sources.” Criminal referrals on the Fulton County case might have already been made, and indictments might be forthcoming. That would have to prompt some kind of attitude adjustment for Senate Majority Leader Thune on behalf of election reform. It could happen at any time. It would at least put Senator Thune between a rock and a hard place. It’s well-understood that at least 80-percent of people polled want the SAVE Act passed There is no debating position that reasonably argues against it. You might have noticed that Mayor Mamdani of New York City called for volunteers to shovel snow in the latest blizzard, and that anyone who stepped-up was required to show two types of photo ID to work the job.

Yet, Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), aligns with the party’s longstanding opposition to voter ID laws, including the SAVE Act. No need to go figure on that. It’s just arrant dishonesty. The president emphasized clearly why the Democrats are against election reform in this week’s State of the Union speech: because the party can only win elections by cheating, by employing massive systematic fraud. He said it so that everybody tuned-in could hear it, and the Democrats just sat stone-faced on their side of the chamber — and that was only minutes after they refused to stand for the proposition that the government’s main job was to act in the interest of American citizens.

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It’s the picture of Bill in a dress that gets to me. That didn’t come from nowhere.

• ‘I Did Not Have Relations With That Man, Jeffrey Epstein’: Bill Clinton (ZH)

Former President Bill Clinton on Friday told lawmakers that he had no clue about crimes carried out by Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who visited the Clinton White House at least 17 times while Bill was president, before letting Clinton fly on the ‘Lolita Express’ dozens of times. “I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,” Clinton said in a statement prepared for a closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York. “I know what I saw, and more importantly, what I didn’t see.”


“My brief acquaintance with Epstein ended years before his crimes came to light, and … I never witnessed during our limited interactions any indication of what was truly going on,” said the 79-year-old former president, adding “I had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing.” Which is weird, because Epstein had a picture of Clinton in a blue ‘Monica Lewinsky’ dress and red pedo club shoes on his wall… Clinton became the first former president forced to testify to Congress – and did so just one day after his wife, Hillary Clinton, testified before the same panel. nWhile Clinton was interviewed in a closed-door session, the GOP chairman of the committee, James Comer, said they would be asking Bill about trips he took on Epstein’s plane, and the White House visits Epstein made while Clinton was president.

Another GOP lawmaker on the panel, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, said that Clinton would be “thoroughly asked” about pictures of him featured in the Epstein files – including one of him soaking in a jacuzzi, and another of him swimming with Ghislaine Maxwell. According to the Epoch Times, an FBI document stated that a person whose name was redacted and was not an Epstein victim reported that she was invited to an orgy with Clinton, but did not attend. Law enforcement emails said that an Epstein victim said she met Epstein through another victim who had traveled with Epstein and Clinton to Africa. Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane in 2002 and 2003, according to previously known flight logs and photographs.


He has said previously through a spokesperson that those trips involved work for the Clinton Foundation and that he never went to Epstein’s island, although he briefly went to Epstein’s home in New York and logs showed Epstein went to the White House while Clinton was president.As Bloomberg notes, ‘Clinton took several trips on Epstein’s private plane before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges that included procurement of a minor to engage in prostitution. Epstein also donated $1,000 to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and $20,000 to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 US Senate campaign. A charity controlled by Epstein contributed $25,000 to the Clintons’ private foundation.’ Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, told the BBC earlier this month that Bill was only flying on the Lolita Express “for his charitable work.”

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Why would Epstein say (paraphrased) that she was prettier in person? I’d gamble that they did meet.

• Hillary: I Didn’t Know Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Was An ‘Acquaintance’ (JTN)

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters Thursday after her deposition to the House Oversight Committee that she told lawmakers that she did not know Jeffrey Epstein and only knew his associate Ghislaine Maxwell as an “acquaintance.” The comment is in line with what the former official has been stating since she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were thrust back into the spotlight over their alleged affiliations with the convicted late-sex offender. Hillary Clinton said she had not been aware of any crime that Epstein had committed and that she was confident her husband had not been aware of any crime either. Hillary Clinton also maintained that she never flew on Epstein’s jet or visited his notorious island.


“I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein. I knew Ghislaine [Maxwell] as an acquaintance,” she insisted. “I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein.”Hillary Clinton also insisted that her daughter Chelsea Clinton was not particularly close to Maxwell after it was reported that Maxwell attended her wedding and vacationed with her in 2009. “She came as the plus one, the guest, of someone who was invited,” Hillary Clinton said. The former first lady additionally insisted that her husband’s relationship with Epstein ended “several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light.” Bill Clinton is expected to testify in front of the House Oversight panel in New York on Friday. The Clintons have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

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Because it identifies her lawyer?

• Hillary Deposition on Epstein Briefly Halted Due to Leaked Photograph (CTH)

Clinton is claiming that she didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein. However, a leaked photograph of the deposition shows the author of her statement likely sitting right next to her. They paused the deposition because the picture was made public.


Apparently, Cheryl Mills is still around as Clinton’s personal lawyer.

https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/status/2027087568852918440

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“.. for Democrats who spent the last several months convinced that immigration was finally turning into their weapon, Harry Enten threw a torrent of cold water on that pipe dream.”

• Even CNN Admits Democrats Are in Big Trouble on Immigration (Matt Margolis)

Democrats have made no secret of the fact that their closing argument for the 2026 midterms will center on affordability, but if sentiment about the economy improves, which the Trump administration is banking on, Democrats will need something else to run on. It’s obvious that Democrats have been hoping that immigration enforcement and the outrage they’ve been trying to foment over it could be that issue. After a year of wall-to-wall immigration drama dominating the news cycle, they were convinced that the public would finally recoil and punish Republicans at the ballot box.That was the bet. But that fantasy is now crashing hard into reality, as CNN’s own polling analyst just handed Democrats some brutally inconvenient news.


On Thursday morning, Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, walked through the numbers on immigration heading into the 2026 midterm cycle. It’s not good news for the Democrats. “This, I think, is so important to note,” Enten said. “After all the events in Los Angeles, after all the events in Minneapolis, after all the events of the last year on immigration, can Democrats actually take advantage on this issue?” “A look at the polling suggests actually, no, they’re in a worse position — in a worse position — than they were at this point during Donald Trump’s first term,” he said, before looking at the numbers, which showed that back in 2018, Democrats held roughly a six-point advantage when voters were asked which party they trusted more on immigration. Now, that edge has flipped, with Republicans holding the advantage instead.

“So this whole idea that Democrats are gonna be able to take advantage of the immigration issue actually doesn’t bear itself out in the polling, despite everything that’s been going on,” Enten noted. Host John Berman tried to make sense of it, and he offered that maybe voters just don’t trust Democrats to do better even if they’re uncomfortable with Trump’s approach. Enten confirmed exactly that. “They think Democrats will do a worse job on immigration than Republicans.” Think things couldn’t get worse? Try again. Trust in border security numbers was even more lopsided. Republicans held a 13-point advantage on border security back in 2018. That advantage has grown to 15 points, and honestly, I’m surprised it’s not more. So the issue Democrats thought might be softening for Republicans has, if anything, hardened further in the GOP’s favor.

“When you put it all together, you put immigration with border security and the idea that Democrats will be able to take the ball and run away on it, the polling data suggests, no, no, no, this is actually an issue that Republicans should be more comfortable running on than Democrats,” Enten said. “Democrats running on immigration may actually be to the Republicans’ advantage.” Read that last line again. Democrats campaigning on immigration could actively help Republicans. And then there’s the Biden comparison. And it really gets ugly here for the left. Yes, Trump’s approval rating on immigration has dipped from its peak. But Enten put it all in context. Biden’s approval rating on immigration at a comparable point in his presidency stood at a dismal 34%, while Trump’s stands at 45%.

That’s an 11-point gap. “You can’t just look at something in isolation. You have to compare it to the alternative. And in this particular case, when you take a look at immigration, and you compare Republicans to the alternative, Democrats, this is an issue that Republicans should really like, and President Trump should like the comparison to Joe Biden.” Among other things. In the end, for Democrats who spent the last several months convinced that immigration was finally turning into their weapon, Harry Enten threw a torrent of cold water on that pipe dream.

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“Rep. Rashida Tlaib appeared to chant “KKK” while Republicans chanted “USA!”—a moment ripe for its own ad. ”

• Brutal: Democrats Walked Straight Into This (ZH)

A new advertisement from conservative group American Sovereignty hammers Democrats for staying seated during President Trump’s State of the Union call to prioritize American citizens over illegal aliens, using footage that lays bare their priorities. The ad, which dropped Thursday, features Trump stating, “If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Republicans rose in applause while Democrats remained glued to their seats, with overlays labeling the divide and accusing Dems of siding with “illegal immigrant criminals.” The spot cuts to Trump’s “These people are crazy” remark before closing with “Republicans are for you.”


As we highlighted in previous coverage, Democrats’ behavior during the SOTU revealed whose side they’re on—and it’s not the American people. Many boycotted the event or sat through applause for victims of illegal alien crime, exposing their allegiance to open borders over citizen safety. They doubled down afterward, with figures like Debbie Wasserman Schultz labeling the speech “absolutely revolting” for prioritizing Americans. Even more telling, Rep. Rashida Tlaib appeared to chant “KKK” while Republicans chanted “USA!”—a moment ripe for its own ad. The ad’s release comes as Republicans eye midterms, with a GOP spokesperson telling the Washington Examiner that vulnerable House Democrats should “get comfortable re-watching the moment they revealed they’re nothing more than America-hating scums who stayed glued to their seats.”

The Democrats handed Republicans a raft of campaign material just in time for the midterms. They don’t even try to hide their hate for Americans If they can’t stand for ‘protect Americans first,’ what exactly are they standing for? This ad marks the first in a seven-figure blitz targeting battleground states like North Carolina, Michigan, and Georgia, per Politico, aiming to leverage the SOTU optics for electoral gains.Trump himself called out Democrats during the speech, saying “you should be ashamed of yourself” for not standing, a moment echoed in White House criticisms and conservative commentary. As midterms loom, this footage serves as a stark reminder: Democrats’ refusal to stand for American priorities hands Republicans ammunition to rally voters against policies that put citizens last.

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“If past orders are any indication, the Patel and Wiles orders were likely based on sweeping generalities and demands for absolute secrecy. That is the signature of Jack Smith.”

• Jack Smith’s Secret Orders Targeting Patel and Wiles Should Alarm Us (Turley)

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith has long operated under Oscar Wilde’s rule that “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Over the last few months, the public has learned of a wide array of secret orders targeting members of Congress, Trump allies, and others. Now, the Administration has learned that FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Susie Wiles were also targeted by Smith in 2022 and 2023 when they were private citizens. Smith was a controversial choice as Special Counsel because of his history of excessive legal arguments and tactics, including his unanimous loss before the Supreme Court in tossing out the conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell.


His tendency to stretch the law to the breaking point also did not play well with juries in high-profile cases, as in his case against John Edwards, which ended in acquittal. Despite such criticisms, Smith immediately returned to his past pattern of tossing aside any restraint or caution. Even Democrats this year expressed objections to his targeting of Republican members of Congress, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Smith told carriers not to tell members of Congress that their calls were being seized. Not only did such records reveal potentially confidential sources, ranging from journalists to whistleblowers, but Smith’s gag order prevented Congress from responding to check the abusive demand.

accounts of the orders contained equally disturbed elements. Reuters reported that “in 2023, the FBI recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney, according to two FBI officials. Wiles’ attorney was aware that the call was being recorded, and consented to it, but Susie Wiles was not.” It is astonishing to hear of a lawyer agreeing to the FBI recording of an attorney-client meeting as a general matter. However, to do so without informing your counsel would be a breathtaking invasion of such protected communications. There is much we still do not know.

its face, these orders appear consistent with the earlier abusive demands. Smith had virtually no basis for targeting Republican members and Trump allies. It was a fishing expedition in which Smith simply compiled lists of every well-known ally of President Trump.There are also concerns over the response to this controversy. There are reports of 10 FBI employees being fired. Agents often carry out the orders of superiors in such investigations. The Administration should assure the public that these agents were afforded due process before being ousted due to their work on orders. The recently disclosed files from these investigations are an indictment of Smith himself. He was given a historic mandate to investigate a former president.

than exercise a modicum of restraint to show the public that this was not a partisan effort, Smith yielded to his worst temptations in targeting a long list of Republicans. In his prior testimony, Smith offered little to justify these orders beyond a shrug that such secret orders routinely occur. However, he was targeting a “who’s who” listing of top political opponents to President Biden and the Democrats.To make matters worse, Smith struggled to release damaging information (and even schedule a trial) on the very eve of the 2024 presidential election. Every action that Smith only magnified his agenda to influence the election. He became a prosecutor consumed by his antagonism toward Trump and his unchecked power.

was sacred for Smith. His demands in the investigation from the courts included a wholesale attack on free speech values. Ultimately, these files are not only an indictment of Jack Smith but also of former Attorney General Merrick Garland, who failed to exercise his authority to oversee Smith and protect core constitutional values.It is essential that Congress and the Administration fully investigate Smith’s surveillance demands. Smith has long demanded accountability for others while evading such accountability for his own actions. If past orders are any indication, the Patel and Wiles orders were likely based on sweeping generalities and demands for absolute secrecy. That is the signature of Jack Smith.

Indeed, Smith appears to have replicated his increasingly infamous record with the collapse of two high-profile cases and lingering questions over his judgment and actions. He has again yielded to his temptations, and the public has paid the price.

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“We’re going to come back. People don’t like Trump. It’s our turn to come back. We’re not going to play by the old rules. No, no, no. We’re going to be tough. You better get your … ”

• What Susan Rice Really Meant by Her Retribution Threat (Victor Davis Hanson)

Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador under the Obama administration, national security adviser, and also served in various capacities with former President Joe Biden, gave an interview on a podcast with Preet Bharara. He is that very liberal federal prosecutor that developed quite a name for himself in New York, going after, I think, targeted a lot of people based on their politics. But nonetheless, it was one of the strangest interviews because she flat out, candidly, with no reservations, sent a message to people who were conservative, Republican, or Trump supporters, and she used “Game of Thrones” imagery. “You’ve taken the need of [President] Donald Trump. You have allowed him to bully you.”


She was talking about the so-called elites in the academic world, in the corporate world, in the institutional world. “And we’re not going to forget,” she says, “that you did that. And you better have your documents ready because when we come back into power, we’re going to … ” And the implication was: take you to court, make you pay, shake you.I don’t know what she was talking about, but it was a direct threat.But here’s what’s strange about it: Start with Susan Rice herself. If you look back through her latter years with the Obama administration, it was nothing but a complete disaster. She was the one that, you remember, that the CIA and the Obama administration wheeled out on a Sunday afternoon to explain the Benghazi attack that killed the four Americans at the annex and the consulate.

Five times she told the American people that those attacks were spontaneous, and they were because of some right-wing Coptic video maker who caused it all. That was not true. That was a preplanned, either an al-Qaeda or ISIS or some type of radical Islamic preplanned assault. People knew what they were doing. They were well armed. They were well organized. Why did she go out five times and mislead the American people? Because the Obama administration had been warned prior that their security was too lax and they did not want to give the impression that that attack was preventable, which it was. She was the one that also assured us, Americans, that when former President Barack Obama issued those red lines and said if Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian forces move WMD around or still have it, that’s going to be intolerable, i.e., I’m going to take it out.

When they didn’t do that and they backed out, and we knew they had it, she lied to the American people and said, essentially, that they no longer had WMD.Remember also she wrote, just wrapping up her career, she wrote a little memo to herself in the last weeks of the Obama administration about Michael Flynn. She went to a meeting, and it was pretty clear in that meeting they had planned to subvert the incoming administration with the false narrative of Russian collusion and that somehow Mike Flynn, the national security adviser-designate, had been colluding with the Russians, but that was not true.

But then she wrote a fake memo to herself suggesting that they hadn’t really done that, that it was all up and up. And then, of course, she and others had requested the unmasking of people related with Trump in otherwise confidential files. So, she doesn’t have a good record. That’s why she didn’t have a high-profile position in the Biden administration.But there is also some real problems with what she said. She never said to corporate America, to the academic world, to the institutional world, to the political world what they had done wrong. She just said, “We’re going to come back. People don’t like Trump. It’s our turn to come back. We’re not going to play by the old rules. No, no, no. We’re going to be tough. You better get your … ”

Well, what had they done? What had they done? If she’s implying they let people off, or they laid people off that were associated with DEI, that was in accordance with the Supreme Court ruling barring race-based preferences in academic life. If she means that Donald Trump does not have the authority to issue an executive order stopping DEI, the whole idea of executive orders goes back to the beginning, almost to the republic. But more importantly, Barack Obama was the one who said, “I have a pen and I have a phone and I’m going to use it.” And that’s when he lost control of Congress and he issued, up until that time, almost the greatest number of executive orders. So, if she’s not going to tell us that anybody committed a felony or misdemeanor, and yet she’s going to punish them, that doesn’t sound too legitimate..

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“They helped me identify that some of my own employees in my department had downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me to record our meetings..”

• Kristi Noem Says DHS Staffers Put Spyware on Her Phone and Laptop (AmG)

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem revealed on Thursday that certain DHS staffers had allegedly installed spyware on her phone and computer, as well as on devices belonging to other political appointees. “You wouldn’t even believe what I’ve found since I’ve been in this department,” Noem told conservative podcaster Patrick Bet-David . Noem said she discovered the spyware last year with the assistance of former DOGE chief Elon Musk and his team. “They helped me identify that some of my own employees in my department had downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me to record our meetings,” Noem said. Bet-David was flabbergasted by the bombshell revelation. Stop it!” he exclaimed. Wow!” “They had done that to several of the politicals,” Noem added.


The DHS Sec. said that if it wasn’t for Musk’s technology experts, there would probably still be spyware on DHS laptops and phones. Noem also disclosed that a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) was just recently discovered containing files “no one knew existed.” “An employee walked by a door and wondered what it was and started asking questions,” she explained, adding that when Trump officials went inside to check it out, they found “individuals working there that had secret files that nobody knew about” on controversial topics.mnNoem told Bet-David that the secret files were turned over to attorneys for review.

The secretary went on to say she has seen “eye-opening” data from Customs and Border Protection (CPB) and the National Laboratories regarding the scientists who traveled to the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to conduct gain of function experiments on coronaviruses. “It was eye-opening,” she said. The FBI and Department of Energy (DOE) have determined with moderate/low confidence that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab. Noem told Bet-David that she never doubted that the “deep state” (entrenched liberal resistance within the bureaucracy) existed, but never would have guessed that it was a bad as it is. “I’m still every day trying to dig out people who don’t love America, not just in this department, but throughout the federal government,” she said.

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“The $2 million award was part of roughly $18 million the Biden DOJ provided to Willis’s office between 2021 and 2024.”

• Biden Admin ‘Invited’ Fani Willis To Get Lucrative Grant (HUSA)

The DOJ under the Biden administration “invited” disgraced Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to apply for a generous taxpayer-funded grant as she prosecuted President Donald Trump. The arrangement came to light after Willis referenced the grant in December 2022 correspondence with DOJ Senior Advisor Scott Pestridge of the Office of Justice Programs. The document was first revealed on Thursday by Just the News through open records requests filed by the outlet and nonprofit America First Legal. According to Just the News, Willis referenced the Office of Justice Programs’ Community-Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative grant, which ultimately awarded her office $2 million.


The timing of the award coincided with her office’s aggressive prosecution of Trump, who at the time was running for president against then-President Joe Biden. m“I want to document your recognition of our progress and services provided with dynamic partners, as we complete sole source steps for our new grant award, a grant in which you invited us to apply,” Willis wrote to Pestridge, according to Just the News. Willis described the award as a “sole source” grant, indicating her office faced no competing applicants.The $2 million award was part of roughly $18 million the Biden DOJ provided to Willis’s office between 2021 and 2024. She claimed the funds would help “at-risk” youth avoid falling into crime or assist with reintegration into society, according to Just the News.

Documents released by Willis’s office in response to open records requests show her office maintained consistent coordination with the DOJ after Trump left office in 2021, when she became one of several left-leaning prosecutors pursuing cases against him. She later charged Trump under Georgia’s RICO statute, accusing him of attempting to subvert the 2020 election results in the state. Her case ultimately unraveled after it was revealed that she had engaged in an affair with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she selected to lead the prosecution. Willis took vacations with Wade while her office paid him, later claiming she reimbursed him in cash, though she never produced receipts to substantiate those payments. Both Wade and Willis were ultimately disqualified from leading the case. After Trump returned to office in 2025, the prosecution was effectively nullified.

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Big changes. Larry Ellison is anything but woke.

• Paramount Wins Bidding War For Warner Bros. After Netflix Drops Out (ZH)

Late on Wednesday, we highlighted an aggressive options trade where a call spread buyer in Netflix options had bet $14 million that Paramount would end up buying Warner Brothers after Netflix walks, something which Polymarket had indicated very much since the start of this particular M&A saga…


… and 24 hours that unknown trader is richer by about $40 million (and a guaranteed visit by the SEC), because late on Thursday, Paramount emerged victorious in the fight to buy Warner Bros. Discovery after Netflix said it wouldn’t match the David Ellison-led company’s latest offer for the iconic Hollywood property. The news sent Netflix shares soaring 10% after hours, demonstrating what the market thought of the deal (not to mention $2.8 billion breakup fee). With the winds of political change shifting, and the DOJ making it very clear that it preferred Paramount to end up the winner in the contested race, Netflix – which would have had to move regulatory mountains to complete the deal – pulled the plug on its deal soon after the Warner board of directors said it determined Paramount’s $31-per-share offer for the entire company was superior to Netflix’s bid for Warner’s movie and television studios and HBO Max streaming service.

“We’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match,” Netflix Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a statement. “This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” the pair said. Assuming regulators approve, and they will, Paramount will own not only Warner Bros. and HBO, but also many popular cable networks including the nevertrump collective known as CNN, TNT, TBS and Food Network. The deal would represent a major ground shift for the entertainment industry, which is trying to adapt to seismic shifts in audience habits and technology. “

Once our Board votes to adopt the Paramount merger agreement, it will create tremendous value for our shareholders,” said Warner Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav. As the WSJ notes, the culmination of the months-long process marks a stunning come-from-behind win for Paramount, whose overtures had previously been rebuffed at every turn by Warner. After multiple unsolicited bids from Paramount last year, Warner opened a sale process that ended with Netflix as the winning suitor. Netflix in December signed a deal to buy Warner’s studios and HBO Max for $27.75 a share, or $72 billion. Of course, anyone who had been paying attention, and sensed which way the political winds blow, would have known the outcome as far back as December.

Shortly after, Paramount launched a hostile takeover effort, going directly to shareholders with a $30-per-share bid for the whole company, including the cable networks Netflix didn’t want. When Ellison’s Skydance Media acquired control of Paramount last August, going after Warner became his top priority. Paramount was seen as too small to compete against deep-pocketed giants such as Disney, Netflix and Amazon. Since announcing its deal with Warner, Wall Street has punished Netflix stock which lost over $170 billion in market value since last September, when Netflix was first seen – by those who don’t know how to read online betting markets – as a potential bidder for Warner, through this past week.


But then earlier this week, Paramount submitted its revised bid of $31 a share, or about $81 billion, just around the time Trump’s DOJ started sniffing around Netflix’s business model. The offer included an increased $7 billion termination fee that Paramount would pay if the transaction failed to close due to regulatory concerns. Paramount said it would foot the bill for the $2.8 billion breakup fee Warner would owe Netflix. Additionally, Paramount accelerated the timing of its proposed “ticking fee” of 25 cents per share, which it would pay to Warner shareholders for each quarter its deal hasn’t closed, to start after Sept. 30 instead of in January.

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Ukraine is where Russis woke up.

• Ukraine Marked This Major Shift In Global Politics (Lukyanov)

Four years ago, Russia’s decision to launch a military operation in Ukraine stunned almost everyone, including supporters and critics alike. Few believed Moscow would take such a drastic step. For decades, the prevailing assumption in global politics had been that force was no longer a legitimate way to resolve disputes. When military action did occur, it was wrapped in euphemisms such as humanitarian intervention and the defense of human rights. In practice, this meant that military power was considered acceptable only when used to reinforce the existing international order, the liberal world order, and therefore only by its architects, above all the United States. Russia broke that rule.


The operation in Ukraine was the culmination of contradictions that emerged after the Cold War. Moscow had long opposed NATO’s eastward expansion and the systematic dismissal of its security concerns. These objections were formally laid out in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s memorandum of December 2021, which called for a revision of the principles underpinning European security since 1990. This was also an implicit admission of failure. Russia had been unable, through diplomacy alone, to secure respect for its interests. The previous model of relations with the West had reached its end. Any new model would require a fundamental reordering of the international system, just as East-West relations once shaped the entire global structure during the Cold War. Ukraine, for reasons both historical and geopolitical, found itself at the center of this

Four years on, Russia’s immediate objectives have not been fully achieved. The operation has lasted far longer than anyone anticipated. Yet the world itself has undeniably changed. The Ukraine conflict did not cause these changes, but it accelerated processes already underway. Russia’s actions demonstrated something many suspected but few dared to test: Western power has limits. Despite dire warnings from Washington, most countries outside the US alliance system refused to join punitive measures against Moscow. They chose their own interests instead. This came as a shock to the Biden administration, which attempted to revive a Cold War framework of “free world versus tyranny.” That effort failed. The problem was not rhetoric, but reality.

Many states important to the US neither met the criteria of the so-called “free world” nor showed any enthusiasm for pretending they did. As Western pressure failed to halt Russia’s campaign, perceptions of a broader crisis in global authority only deepened. By 2023-24, Moscow had reinforced an alternative vision of international cooperation, notably through BRICS and similar groupings. These were not ideological alliances, but pragmatic ones. Serving as signs of a world increasingly organized around choice rather than loyalty.The real turning point came with the change of administration in Washington. The liberal world order was no longer treated as a sacred structure to be preserved, but as an obstacle to American national interests.

US dominance remained the goal, but it was redefined in bluntly transactional terms: securing material advantages and extracting value wherever possible. Where the Biden administration sought to maintain the old system, albeit unsuccessfully, the Trump administration speaks openly about restoring Western power without the institutions or courtesies that once accompanied it. At the Munich Security Conference this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Americans are “not interested in polite managed decline of the West.” The message was clear. The US has entered a struggle for a new division of the world, and intends to act while its accumulated advantages still give it leverage

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As an ad campaign, pretty brilliant. But Germany is NOT a muslim country. Europe has been Christian for 2000 years. Europeans should honor and respect their ancestors a lot moe than they do at present. Europeans are losing their identity and indeed themselves. And they don’t even see it. They just let islam take their countries.

• McDonald’s Germany HIDES Food Ads During Ramadan (MN)

McDonald’s latest marketing stunt in Germany syncs billboards to show empty packaging by day and full meals only after sunset, drawing backlash for prioritizing a minority’s religious observance over the broader customer base. As Ramadan unfolds, McDonald’s Germany has rolled out a campaign that effectively erases tempting food visuals from digital billboards during fasting hours, a move seen by critics as yet another concession to cultural shifts driven by mass immigration.The fast food chain’s digital out-of-home posters display empty fries containers and burger boxes throughout the day, filling them with food images precisely at sunset when Muslims break their fast.

According to Newsweek, the ads carry the message “Happy Ramadan” and use sun-synced data tied to local prayer times to trigger the switch from empty to full.

The post sparked sharp reactions online. One user remarked: “What a great way to ignore the majority of your customers ????” Another called it: “This is a sign that your country has been conquered without a shot fired.” A third questioned: “Great idea if you are in the Middle East. What about the non-Muslims? Or do we not count any more?”This campaign echoes recent events underscoring tensions around cultural accommodation in the West. Just days ago, videos of thousands of Muslims gathering for Ramadan prayers in New York City’s Times Square went viral, with observers labeling it a “disturbing display” amid chants of “Allahu Akbar.” Professor Gad Saad quipped sarcastically: “What’s the big deal!? Just a bunch of pious men praying to Allah. I’m sure that it will all work out.”

That incident is tied to broader controversies, including Rep. Randy Fine’s response to activist Nerdeen Kiswani’s claim that dogs are “unclean.” Fine announced the “Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act,” aimed at withholding federal funds from areas banning dogs as pets, highlighting concerns over cultural shifts in regions with expanding Muslim communities. Across the Atlantic, a similar dynamic played out in London, where a Metropolitan Police officer defended a Christian preacher’s right to free speech against an angry crowd in Whitechapel, declaring: “In this country, we have freedom of speech.” She added: “I understand that you guys don’t want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don’t listen to him. He’s not in your home.”

The episode raised questions about inconsistent policing, contrasting with past arrests of preachers like Pastor John Sherwood for expressing biblical views on family. These developments paint a picture of Western institutions—from corporations to law enforcement—yielding ground to avoid offense, often at the expense of longstanding traditions and majority norms. In Germany, home to millions of Muslim residents following waves of migration, such gestures risk alienating the wider public while fueling debates over integration. As globalism pushes for unchecked diversity, moves like McDonald’s billboard tweak serve as reminders that true coexistence demands mutual respect, not one-sided surrender. Defending core Western values remains essential to preserve the freedoms that built these societie

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Jennings AI Pipelines https://twitter.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2027386792878444921?s=20 Glenn Beck

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 25 2026

Feb 252026
 
 February 25, 2026  Posted by at 10:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  62 Responses »


Piet Mondriaan Victory Boogie Woogie 1942-44


• Are Democrats Working Against Their Own Voters? (Eric Florack)
• How a Party Offends Its Voters (Daniel McCarthy)
• What the FBI Is Investigating in Criminal Probe of 2020 Election (ET)
• Democrats Double Down on SOTU Boycott (DS)
• ‘You Owe Us’ Is the Mantra of the Left (Victor Davis Hanson)
• US To Integrate Musk’s Grok AI Into Classified Military Systems (RT)
• Trump, Along With Democrats, Will Make Their Case Tuesday at State of the Union (JTN)
• Netflix’s Stock Plunges After Refusing to Fire Susan Rice (Bryan S. Jung)
• We Need to Talk About Artemis (Stephen Green)
• Royal Theater, Silent Streets: Loud On Epstein Ties, Silent On The Roving Gangs (David Manney)
• Ukraine (EU) Strikes Russian Oil Pumping Station (CTH)
• Slovakia Halts Electricity Supplies To Ukraine (RT)
• Hungary Vetoes €90 Billion EU Loan For Ukraine (RT)
• Ukraine Hates Us – Hungary (RT)
• The New Navalny Poison – This Swedish Disinformation is a British Lie (Helmer)

 


 

Apart from the SOTU, which deerves enough attention already, there’s the rumor today that France and Britain have de facto become Ukraine’s army, and are as we speak preparing to send a nuclear bomb to Kyiv.

 


 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2026494398477803567 https://twitter.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2026269269541916753?s=20

 


 


“I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” — Charlie Brown

• Are Democrats Working Against Their Own Voters? (Eric Florack)

Let’s start with a few quotes. This quote comes from a May 22, 2020, interview on The Breakfast Club, a popular radio show, where Biden was speaking with host Charlamagne tha God. As the interview was wrapping up, Biden famously said: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Next, we offer up for your inspection this quote from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles on May 6, 2024: “Right now, we have young Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word “computer” is. They don’t know. They don’t know these things.”She made the remarks while touting a $400 million supercomputer initiative in New York.


And finally, and most recently, we have this from California Gov. Gavin Newsom:”I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you. I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy… You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.”nbNewsom was obviously trying to impress the predominantly black audience that attended the Atlanta event promoting his newly released memoir. If you wanted an indication of his presidential ambitions, you need look no further than his book release. If you were looking for an indication of how bad he would be in the role, look no further than the quote. I mean, if he believes black people can’t read, why in the world is he promoting his book to them? For the pictures?

It’s fairly obvious that these were not planned remarks. If they were planned, someone in Gov. Gruesome’s team needs flogging. We can assume these quotes just kind of slipped out, an untold truth.The quotes do reveal something of the inner workings of the leftist mind. Just as obvious, in every case of the above quotes, minority citizens are diminished in the eyes of the members of a party supposedly on their side. Can you imagine the howling and screaming if anyone in the GOP even came close to this level of stupidity? Why, the press would be 24/7 wall-to-wall with it for the next month, if not longer, And it would come up again at the next election. As it is, do a search on the Biden quote, as an example. You’ll find very few references to it.

In a sane world, any of these quotes would be career-ending for any political figure. But of course, these are Democrats, so sanity doesn’t even enter the discussion.Then we have the overarching antisemitism of the Democrats that goes back decades. In that direction, for example, lies the political demise of Joe Lieberman. The cause? His support for Israel in the face of attacks by the Palestinians, as directed by Iran. Matt Margolis gets into some of this: Axios is reporting that senior Democratic officials who worked on the party’s secret post-election autopsy concluded that Kamala Harris lost measurable support because of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war. According to multiple sources, the DNC’s own data flagged the party’s Gaza position as a “net-negative” in the 2024 election.

That’s a rather diplomatic way of saying that they weren’t anti-Israel enough. According to the report, the DNC did meet with the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project — a pro-Palestinian advocacy organization — as part of its evaluation process. During that meeting, according to IMEU spokesperson Hamid Bendaas, “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Two other senior IMEU aides confirmed the same conclusion. Axios independently corroborated that Democratic officials believe the issue damaged the party’s appeal with specific voter demographics. Yeah, that demographic is the antisemitic left.

Indeed so. But of course, a bit under 70% of Jewish citizens vote Democrat at every opportunity. Similarly, black voters vote Democrat in huge percentages, though that’s been changing of late. In every case, the Democrat claim to speak for the advancement of traditional minority groups, for which they receive much support from voters. Democrats claim that the GOP is a bunch of racist, misogynist fools who would bring back slavery if they could.

And yet, finding anti-black, anti-woman, anti-religious, anti-farmer, anti-flyover states, and anti-middle class statements and actions by these same Democrats is easy enough. And of course, Donald Trump is the racist Nazi. Right? Yeah, makes no sense to me, either.nbTake care of yourselves today. I’ll see you here tomorrow.

Thought of the day: “I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” — Charlie Brown

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“His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read..”

• How a Party Offends Its Voters (Daniel McCarthy)

Gavin Newsom won’t be the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee unless he wins a significant share of the African American vote. So how’s he courting it? Promoting his new memoir to a largely black audience in Atlanta, the California governor decided to forge a connection by boasting about his poor SAT scores and difficulty reading. “I’m like you,” he said.”You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy” and “you’ve never seen me read a speech. Because I cannot read a speech.”Newsom suffers from dyslexia, but he obviously wasn’t assuming he was addressing a room full of voters with the same debility.He just looked around and concluded this audience wouldn’t have high academic aspirations.


“How insulting” was the response on X from Nina Turner, a former Democratic state senator in the battleground state Ohio and now a senior fellow with the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. The outspoken rapper Nicki Minaj was just as direct: “His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read,” she posted. Even a tactful Democratic consultant quoted in TheGrio said she was “disappointed” by Newsom: “He’s a great wordsmith, so I was kind of bothered by the way that he said it,” Ameshia Cross told the outlet. Luckily for Newsom, some of his rivals for the 2028 nomination have even less rapport with black voters. Polls often register Pete Buttigieg’s African American support at zero percent.

The likes of Buttigieg are no threat to Newsom no matter how many gaffes he makes, but his fellow Californian Kamala Harris is another story. It’s true her 2020 campaign didn’t even make it to the first primary — it imploded in December 2019. But Harris failed upward, getting chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate and then replacing him without a competition four years later. Now she’s Newsom’s roadblock. The ’28 race isn’t far away: In about a year, all the contenders on the Democrats’ side will be clear — and maybe they already are. Newsom and Harris have serious liabilities, not least the deteriorating condition of the blue state they both call home: Does the whole country want to wind up like today’s California?

Do businesses and families fleeing Newsom’s state for the freedom and lower taxes of Texas and Florida want the governor’s ruinous recipe attempted nationwide? Yet Democrats looking for an alternative to the California scheme represented by Harris and Newsom have little to choose from. Pennsylvania is the nation’s most important battleground state, and culturally and economically similar enough to other battlegrounds like Ohio and Michigan that a successful Pennsylvania pol might have the right stuff to sweep the Electoral College. But Josh Shapiro, the Keystone State’s Democratic governor, has problems of his own with one of the party’s key constituencies — critics of Israel.

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“Fulton County had more than half a million ballots to tabulate—almost 90 percent cast early or by mail. The result was announced several days later: Biden won the county by 26-point margin.”

• What the FBI Is Investigating in Criminal Probe of 2020 Election (ET)

After the election offices of Georgia’s most populous county were raided last month, the FBI has disclosed information indicating where its investigation is heading. Federal laws may have been broken during the 2020 election according to the affidavit supporting the court-approved raid. Yet the breadth of the materials seized shows the FBI may be able to check the integrity of the ballots more broadly, uncovering further issues or putting speculation to bed. President Donald Trump’s campaign challenged the Georgia election most vigorously, as he lost the state to President Joe Biden by fewer than 12,000 votes according to the official tally.


The legal challenges failed. Instead, Trump was indicted based on rationale that his efforts to challenge the election results were allegedly executed with corrupt intent. The case was dismissed after he became president again in 2025. The renewed investigation now targeting Fulton County, which covers the broader Atlanta area, uses a rationale analogous to the case against Trump. The affidavit states that if known irregularities in the election were intentional, such acts would be criminal. On Jan. 28, agents seized some 700 boxes of election records, including physical ballots from the 2020 election. County officials have since filed a lawsuit seeking to have the materials returned.

The issues detailed in the affidavit were largely discovered years ago by concerned citizens using data obtained through freedom of information requests or litigation. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was responsible for overseeing the election and is running for governor of the state, has dismissed the issues as administrative and human errors too small to affect the election’s result. The FBI, however, has a different perspective. “If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law regardless of whether the failure to retain records or the deprivation of a fair tabulation of a vote was outcome determinative for any particular election or race,” reads the affidavit signed by FBI Special Agent Hugh Evans.

Raffensperger has repeatedly stressed that the 2020 votes were counted three times, including a hand recount and a machine recount. However, many of the deficiencies outlined in the affidavit happened during these recounts. Vote counting in Georgia starts by law on election day. Fulton County had more than half a million ballots to tabulate—almost 90 percent cast early or by mail. The result was announced several days later: Biden won the county by 26-point margin. One issue with the results was a lack of receipts. Each tabulator machine should be “closed” at polls closing and tabulator tape should be printed out to show how many ballots and votes for each candidate were counted. Then, the tape should be signed by the poll manager and two witnesses.

Yet tabulator tapes for more than 300,000 votes weren’t signed, and some were missing altogether, wrote Evans, referring to an analysis by Clay Parikh, a voting machine security expert. Raffensperger said that was merely administrative oversight, as the vote tallies aren’t recorded on the tape alone. They are also preserved on memory cards in the machines. But Parikh’s analysis went deeper. “Parikh identified one tabulator that was used to close out 15 tabulator machines from 12 different locations. In addition, the poll closing time and report printed times on several closing tabulator tapes were close enough in time that Parikh believed someone had to have manipulated the times on the reports,” Evans wrote. “Parikh believed this showed that the memory cards were removed from the original tabulator and put in another tabulator to print out the closing tabulator tapes.”

The tabulators also have “protective counters” that track how many ballots have been scanned on them over their lifetime. “The protective counters on at least five tabulator tapes from the same unit were identical,” Parikh found, according to Evans. “Some of the reported ballots scanned exceeded the protective counter number.” “This indicated to Parikh that no ballots were ever scanned on these machines and that the numbers generated from those ballots were done so by placing an unencrypted memory card into the unit to generate the closing tape,” Evans wrote. “This would have allowed an opportunity for the tabulation to be tampered with.”

The tabulators are supposed to scan each ballot, creating a digital record. But the majority of the images from the original in-person voting count have not been preserved by the county, Evans said. At the time, the county was not legally required to preserve them, but it’s not clear why they were discarded to begin with. “This is another impediment to ruling out non-criminal explanations for the activities during the election,” the affidavit said.
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With the oldest and lamest trope imaginable: “Trump is marching America towards fascism.”

• Democrats Double Down on SOTU Boycott (DS)

More Democrats are joining a boycott of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. Sens. Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego recently joined the ranks of Democrat lawmakers over the weekend. “I am not going to the State of the Union,” Gallego said in a video posted to social media on Saturday. “There’s more productive things than I can do with my time than just sitting there for two hours and clapping on cue. Right now, this country is hurting.” Instead, the senator will be at home in Arizona during the address.


Schiff’s participation in the boycott was also announced on Saturday. MeidasTouch wrote on X that Schiff will instead speak at the “People’s State of the Union,” a counter address hosted by the news outlet and progressive-aligned nonprofit MoveOn Civic Action.

Democrats announcing their boycott of the State of the Union comes after progressive-aligned organizations, like Amplify Edge’s “Young People Address the Nation” campaign, pressured Democrat lawmakers last week to boycott the address. As the boycott grows, the left-leaning sports and political commentator Stephen A. Smith has come out against Democrat theatrics. Smith said on his SiriusXM radio show that the Democrats’ refusal to attend the address “ticks him off,” calling them “juvenile.” “Why do they get to circumvent the need and the insistence of mere decorum? This is the kind of stuff that ticks me off,” Smith stated. “At some point in time, ladies and gentlemen, there’s got to be an adult in the room.”

https://twitter.com/JasonJournoDC/status/2024450693252219275

“If you’re going to act as juvenile, as petulant, as petty as you accuse president of the United States to be, how are you ever going to hold a high moral ground at least high enough to judge him accordingly?” Smith added. During Trump’s address to Congress last year, some Democrats tried to steal the show. Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, interrupted the speech with shouts and gestures several times before he was removed from the chamber.mSchiff’s RSVP to the event hosted former MSNBC anchors Joy Reid and Katie Phang comes after 12 of his congressional colleagues—including Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.; and the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas—announced last week that they would not “legitimize” Trump’s “lies.”

“Donald Trump will use the State of the Union address as a platform to gaslight the American people and normalize and justify their terror, abuse, and violations of our rights. I refuse to legitimize it,” Ramirez stated in a release. Van Hollen added on X that this “cannot be business as usual” because “Trump is marching America towards fascism.”

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“So, they’re paying 55% of their income and nobody ever says, “Thank you for doing that, you people, we have a very skilled elite that allows us to have this huge budget.”

• ‘You Owe Us’ Is the Mantra of the Left (Victor Davis Hanson)

Sami Winc: Two things that came together for me. One was [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s 9.5% increase in the property tax for New Yorkers, but not that alone. I’m sure our audience has read about that. But I was looking at Power Line. I always like to give a shout-out to them because they have some great articles, and they were comparing New York State’s budget versus Florida’s budget. And they came up with, well, it’s only half at the state level. So, I thought, well, let’s look at the city level, New York City versus Miami. And while the billions that each of them has to spend is not meaningful in and of themselves. So, for example, New York City’s budget is $127 billion while Miami’s is only $3.4. But that being said, per citizen, what has to be paid into these cities? And so, for Mamdani, each of his citizens has to pay $14,431 in for his budget. And in Miami, it’s just half of that, at just under $7,000 per citizen.


Victor Davis Hanson: And it’s more disproportionate because in New York, the number of people who are actually paying taxes is a much smaller percentage than in Miami. He inherited the city that was this blue-chip financial market, this cultural, financial capital of the world, and the first thing he did was raise spending by $11 billion. Second thing he did was prove that he couldn’t get the trash or the snow off the street during the storm. Third thing he did, it was very hard to find an appointee who somewhere in their dark history had not issued or written something antisemitic. All he does is smile and try to be … basically, his message is: I’m not Lenin, and Trotsky or Stalin. I’m the nice, happy-faced communist, and you’re going to like me, and you’re going to like my communism. We’re all going to get along.

I mean, if you’re in New York, if you’re in California, you got a choice. If you’re in California and this billionaire tax passes, and you’ve got to come up with $50 million, you’re going flee. If you’re in New York, and they’re going to raise your property tax on these multimillion-dollar buildings, you’re talking what could be $20 or $30, $40, $50 million more a year, then you’re going to flee, get out. If you don’t, they’re just going to keep doing it. They’re going keep targeting you because they have an idea. I don’t think people realize that. nThe socialist mind … I knew a lot of socialists in the universities and some friends of mine, and they always think … The whole core of socialism is, I work hard, and no one knows how I suffer at my job as a nurse, as a farmer, whatever. And I believe in the labor theory of value.

Why is it that when Victor had a Ph.D. but he was pruning vines, he was only making $4 an hour—I was for three years—and then all of a sudden, five years later, he is an academic, and he is sitting in between classes and having coffee and he’s making $50 an hour. That’s not fair. And so, they don’t think about supply and demand, expertise, education, nothing. And somebody would say, “Well, when Victor was pruning vines, a lot of people could not only prune them, they could probably prune them better.” When he was teaching a particular Greek literature class, and they thought that was an important class to offer. Questionable, but that’s what they said. Very few people could do it. They don’t accept that.

And so, they run on this envy that we work hard, and we get up, and we do things, and therefore we should be compensated. And that’s what a socialist is, and they’re going keep raising taxes. The other thing about it is, when they raise taxes, they don’t ever say thank you. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, even former Sen. Dianne [Feinstein], they’re all wealthy, but they never said, “We want to thank the people in California that are the 1% that are paying 50% of the income tax.” And by the way, the 50% of the income tax in California, there’s only about, I don’t know what there is, 250 billionaires? They usually pay capital gains tax. They pay at about, I don’t know, 28%. The people in that 1% of Californians are highly compensated professionals and small businesspeople who make a million or two million, three million dollars, and then they get hit with a 13.3% tax rate, plus their federal plus Medicare.

So, they’re paying 55% of their income and nobody ever says, “Thank you for doing that, you people, we have a very skilled elite that allows us to have this huge budget.” They don’t. The attitude is always, “They have to. They have to pay more.”

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The Pentagon clashed with rival contractor Anthropic over ethics limitations on its tech … Still, not an rexclusive deal. ChatGPT, Gemini et al are there.

• US To Integrate Musk’s Grok AI Into Classified Military Systems (RT)

The US Department of War has reportedly signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s xAI to integrate its Grok chatbot into classified military systems, escalating pressure on rival contractor Anthropic as it refuses to lift safeguards on its Claude model. The deal, first reported by the New York Times and confirmed by Axios on Monday, would make Grok the second AI system approved for use on the military’s most sensitive networks, where intelligence analysis, weapons development, and battlefield operations take place. Until now, Anthropic’s Claude has been the sole model available on classified platforms, through a partnership with Palantir Technologies.


The agreement comes as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for what sources expect to be a tense meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday. According to Axios, Hegseth is expected to present an ultimatum: agree to make Claude available for “all lawful purposes” without additional safeguards, or face consequences including potential designation as a “supply chain risk” – a label typically reserved for entities linked to foreign adversaries.


https://twitter.com/iam_smx/status/2026100949618442296?s=20

Anthropic has resisted Pentagon demands to remove restrictions that prevent its technology from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in fully autonomous weapons systems with no humans in the loop. xAI has reportedly agreed to the demands, but the company has yet to comment on the reports. Google is also reportedly “close” to a deal allowing classified use of its Gemini model, according to people briefed on the discussions, while OpenAI remains “not close” as it continues working on safety technology.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that replacing Anthropic within its classified systems could cause short-term disruptions. The model was used during the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last month – the first known instance of AI playing a direct role in an active military raid. Anthropic has positioned itself as the safety-conscious alternative within the AI industry. CEO Amodei has repeatedly warned of the existential dangers posed by unconstrained artificial intelligence, including “autonomy risks.” The company’s Safeguards Research Team lead, Mrinank Sharma, abruptly resigned last week with a cryptic warning that “the world is in peril.”

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And they did.

• Trump, Along With Democrats, Will Make Their Case Tuesday at State of the Union (JTN)

President Donald Trump is set to deliver his State of the Union Address Tuesday evening, when he is expected to highlight his accomplishments during his first year back in office and spotlight goals for the coming year. During an event at the White House Monday morning, Trump teased that his address is “going to be a long speech, because we have so much to talk about.” The president is expected to tout his accomplishments over the last year, highlighting tax cuts, lower gas prices, a dramatic decline in illegal border crossings, lower crime rates, lower drug costs, international peace deals, and trade deals – despite presiding over the longest government shutdown in history.


Trump’s address comes as the federal government is in the midst of a partial shutdown that is affecting the Department of Homeland Security. Several Democratic lawmakers have announced their intention to boycott the address; it’s unclear if other Democratic lawmakers will protest the president in the House Gallery. Last year, several held paddles to make statements. The president will likely make the economy one of his top priorities, highlighting the passage and signing of the Big, Beautiful Bill last summer. In briefings and news conferences, Trump and his administration often point to higher tax credits and a tax break for tipped workers as well as a healthy stock market, as evidence that his economic policies are winning.

Among the top issues Trump will likely spotlight are crime and immigration. During the past year, the president has deployed the National Guard to select major U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., to tackle crime. The president will likely spend part of his speech trying to sell his economic agenda, including his use of tariffs. Trump could also use the opportunity to push his Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster to pass key legislation, such as election security measures. While Trump will likely point to lower gas prices and lower taxes, Democrats have been pushing affordability.

Democrats have tapped newly inaugurated Gov. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s address Tuesday night, with Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., to deliver a Democratic response in Spanish. The address comes ahead of a critical mid-term election, where both Republicans and Democrats have a lot riding on their messaging. It’s unclear who the president will be hosting in the gallery Tuesday evening. However, multiple reports indicate that the men’s U.S. hockey team, which just brought home the gold, has been invited to attend.

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“.. How much is she being paid, and for what???“

• Netflix’s Stock Plunges After Refusing to Fire Susan Rice (Bryan S. Jung)

Netflix’s stock plunged after its refusal to fire former senior Obama and Biden official Susan Rice from its board, following her threats of retribution against supporters of President Donald Trump under a future Democrat administration. Rice was national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President Barack Obama, and later served as a senior advisor in the Biden White House. She returned to Netflix’s board in 2023 after leaving her role as director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Biden administration. Rice boasted during a podcast last week that “it is not going to end well” for corporations, news organizations, and law firms that “bent the knee” to Trump, claiming that their deference to the president is unpopular.


She said that firms aligned with Trump could face an “accountability agenda” if Democrats return to power, stating, “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget.” “I think they’ve got another thing coming … they’re going to be surprised. Democrats have had a bellyful, and we’re not going to play by, you know, the old set of rules,” added Rice. Trump has since demanded that Netflix fire Rice and warned the company to get rid of Rice or “pay the consequences.” “Netflix should fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences,” Trump wrote on Truth Social over the weekend. ”She’s got no talent or skills – Purely a political hack! HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK. How much is she being paid, and for what???“

The streaming service is currently in the midst of a bidding war with Paramount Skydance Corp. to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., excluding the company’s cable networks, including CNN, which the White House has the power to scuttle altogether. Netflix’s $72 billion bid for Warner Brothers Discovery requires regulatory anti-trust approval from the U.S. Department of Justice, which is scrutinizing the deal during this latest political controversy. Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover bid for all of Warner Bros. Discovery, promising shareholders $30 per share in an all-cash deal.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has so far refused to fire Rice and told the BBC that the acquisition is a “business deal, not a political deal.” “He [Trump] likes to do a lot of things on social media,” Sarandos said, according to the BBC. Sarandos added that regulatory bodies, not the White House, should make a decision on the deal. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the DOJ is investigating whether Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery could hurt competition and whether the streaming service’s previous acquisitions may have affected the industry’s creative talent.

The streaming giant has been accused of anticompetitive tactics in negotiations with independent content creators for acquiring programming, reported Bloomberg.It is unknown if the decline in Netflix’s stock price at market open reflected investor concerns over political interference in corporate governance, but the media company’s shares tumbled Monday before slightly recovering at $76.02 per share at closing, a 3.37% loss.

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Let Elon Musk reorganize US space programs.

• We Need to Talk About Artemis (Stephen Green)

We need to talk about NASA’s Artemis program to get the U.S. back to the Moon because things can’t continue like this.The initial reports of last week’s Artemis 2 wet dress rehearsal (WDR) made it sound like the hydrogen leaks were acceptable and our first manned mission around the Moon would be good to go for launch during the first week of March. That was Thursday evening. Friday’s midday press conference was all happy talk about how well the WDR went.Before anyone at NASA had time to grab lunch on Saturday, agency chief Jared Isaacman revealed that “overnight data showed an interruption in helium flow in the SLS interim cryogenic propulsion stage,” and “teams are troubleshooting and preparing for a likely rollback of Artemis 2 to the VAB [NASA’s massive Vehicle Assembly Building].”


Easy fixes are performed outdoors, right there on the launch pad. Trickier fixes require a slow journey back to the VAB on NASA’s tracked Crawler-Transporter 2 (CT-2). As it turns out, Artemis 2 requires one of those trickier fixes. So much for that March launch window. Now it’s “fingers crossed!” for early April, depending, of course, on how long it takes to find and fix whatever went wrong during last week’s WDR. Here’s the thing to remember about the SLS rocket that by law must launch at least the first three Artemis missions: This is as good as it gets. Leaks, delays, regular trips on CT-2 to and from VAB? That’s the norm for SLS. As discussed in a couple of previous columns, each SLS is a unique snowflake.

Earlier this month, space reporter Eric Berger asked NASA’s top civil servant, Amit Kshatriya, about the SLS’s issues and low flight cadence. “Every time we [try to launch] these are very bespoke components, they’re in many cases made by incredible craftsmen,” Kshatriya replied. “It’s the first time this particular machine has borne witness to cryogens, and how it breathes, and how it vents, and how it wants to leak is something we have to characterize.” nIn other words, figuring out how to correct the hydrogen leak on the Artemis 1 SLS rocket taught NASA very little about the leaks it might encounter on the Artemis 2 rocket. Or what leaks NASA will find on Artemis 3 two years from now. Or maybe three.

The Artemis program was designed during the first Trump administration, using existing hardware with the hope of getting us back to the Moon by 2024. Now NASA claims 2028. 2030 might be more realistic. So whatever the original hope was, it hasn’t materialized. And at $4 billion-plus per SLS, everybody (including high-ranking NASA people) understands that SLS is a dead end. My modest proposal is this: As Dr. Evil might say, a ONE BILLION DOLLAR prize for the first private company to put at least three astronauts on the lunar surface (leaving a fourth one in orbit to crew a command vehicle is fine, if needed) near the southern ice resources. The landing mission must also include a “useful” amount of cargo for at least getting started on a permanent habitat.

The crew must also return safely to Earth, naturally. A billion dollars is a lot of money. But it’s also a little less than 25% of the cost of a single SLS rocket, not including everything else that goes into a manned NASA mission. Just on rockets alone, taxpayers would stand to save more than $7 billion on Artemis 2 and 3 — and at the SLS’s unpredictable launch cadence, we might even get to the Moon sooner.

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All the attention goes to the man formerly known as prince.

The 1,400 mass-raped girls? Not so much. Their story doesn’t sell. The press make sure of that.

• Royal Theater, Silent Streets (David Manney)

Need an idea about how to start an argument between people in the UK? Mention a royal name alongside Jeffrey Epstein. That should get the fires started. The elite formerly known as Prince Andrew’s association with Epstein remains a global fixation — global if you mean England. Political editor and commentator Emma-Jo Morris recently highlighted how authorities moved aggressively in matters tied to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, while long-running grooming gang cases have dragged on for years without any similar feelings of urgency.


Andrew, formerly the Duke of York, stepped back from the spotlight after the crown stripped him of public and royal duties following his 2019 BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, which generated massive political shockwaves. In America, Virginia Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit against Andrew, which was later settled. Because of the scandal, the Royal Family removed his honorary military titles and patronages. The Epstein story burned like hydrogen fueled by leaking inert helium gas and combusting front pages like the Hindenburg. Every development generated debate in Parliament and endless commentary across Britain.

Meanwhile, documented grooming gang scandals in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford revealed systematic sexual exploitation of young girls. In Rotherham alone, independent investigator Professor Alexis Jay concluded that around 1,400 children were abused between 1997 and 2013, while many of the perpetrators were identified as men of Pakistani Muslim backgrounds. Alexis Jay, who authored the report, used to be chief inspector of social work in Scotland. She’s seen a lot. But despite being deeply familiar with the details of this report, even she seemed shaken by the words coming out of her mouth at Tuesday’s press conference about the victims, some as young as 11, abused from 1997 until last year.

“It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse the child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators. They were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England. They were abducted, beaten and intimidated,” Jay said. Nine men in Rochdale were convicted in 2012 for grooming and trafficking underage girls.

The nine defendants were jailed for a total of 77 years, with the ringleader, a 59-year-old man from Oldham, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, receiving a 19-year term after being convicted of two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault and trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation.Kabeer Hassan, 25, of Oldham, was jailed for nine years for rape and three years, concurrently, for conspiracy. Hamid Safi, 22, an illegal immigrant of no fixed address, was jailed for four years for conspiracy and one year, concurrently, for trafficking.Greater Manchester Police were criticized for earlier failures of intervention. The story remained the same in Telford, where an independent inquiry led by Tom Crowther KC discovered that as many as 1,000 girls may have been sexually exploited over decades.

In his closing comments, Telford added: “People will not forget Telford’s history of child sexual exploitation – and nor should they. But in my view Telford’s approach – the Council’s approach – to the Recommendations, to engagement with its key partners and most of all with those three people it let down as children, now stands as a model. All involved – but particularly the Consultees, who put aside hurt and anger and years of being dismissed in order to ensure that next generations are better protected than they were – deserve our very high praise.”

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“.. we see European leaders attacking their own European “allies” through the use of Ukraine. If you do not support the continued bloodlust, you are an enemy of the EU collective hive mind”

• Ukraine (EU) Strikes Russian Oil Pumping Station (CTH)

The Ukraine military, technically and non-pretendingly accepted as the EU military, has targeted a key oil pumping station in Russia that feeds into the westerly directed oil supply. However, if you stand back from the western media, what you will notice from this attack is not the target in Russia, but the customers at the end of the pipeline in Europe, mainly Hungary and Slovakia.


[…] Through local stations, including infrastructure around Kaleykino, oil from Tatarstan and neighboring regions feeds into the main pipeline, which runs through the Samara region and continues westward toward Belarus and further to countries in Eastern and Central Europe. […] There were also earlier reports that Ukrainian forces carried out several attacks on Druzhba pipeline infrastructure inside Russia, which at times disrupted Russian oil supplies to Hungary and Slovakia. {source}


So, what’s going on here?Well, with the anniversary of the Russian Federation beginning the war into Ukraine, the Europeans who now control the military operations inside Ukraine are targeting European countries who do not align with their bloodlust, specifically Hungary and Slovakia. Both Hungary and Slovakia are land locked countries without easy access seaports. Because of their geographic locations, they rely on Russian oil and gas for their energy needs. Hungary and Slovakia have not wanted to expand the war against Russia. The EU is demanding Hungary and Slovakia agree to expanded war. The European ‘coalition of the willing’ is now targeting key Russian infrastructure that supplies energy products to European countries who are not in compliance with the EU dictates of war.

Putin says threats to energy pipelines sabotage peace process with Ukraine. In his televised speech, the Russian president also accused Ukraine of threatening Russian energy pipelines with the help of Western intelligence agencies. He claimed these attacks were aimed to sabotage the peace process. Putin also stressed it was vital for Russia to strengthen the defence of energy infrastructure and other strategic sectors. {source} This is why Secretary of State Marco Rubio travelled to Hungary and Slovakia last week. Essentially, now we see European leaders attacking their own European “allies” through the use of Ukraine. If you do not support the continued bloodlust, you are an enemy of the EU collective hive mind.

https://twitter.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2026291115100418176?s=20 Read more …

Ukraine blocks the flow of Russian oil to Slovakia, but still expects Slovakia to send it power.

• Slovakia Halts Electricity Supplies To Ukraine (RT)

Bratislava has stopped providing emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine until Kiev restores the flow of Russian oil to Slovakia through the Druzhba pipeline, Prime Minister Robert Fico has said, warning of “further reciprocal steps.” The prime minister made the announcement on Monday, when the ultimatum he issued over the weekend to Kiev to resume operations of the Soviet-era pipeline expired. The Druzhba pipeline, which connects Russia to Slovakia and Hungary, has been out of commission since late January. Kiev claims it was damaged in Russian strikes, which Moscow denies. Both Slovakia and Hungary have accused Ukraine of deliberately withholding supplies for political reasons and threatened retaliation.


Announcing the halt to electricity supplies to Ukraine, Fico reiterated that Ukraine’s actions were a “purely political decision aimed at blackmailing Slovakia.” “Reciprocity is a fundamental rule in international relations. The government’s first response to the hostile acts of the Ukrainian president in the form of stopping emergency electricity supply is therefore entirely appropriate,” Fico stated, warning of “further reciprocal steps” if oil supplies are not resumed. Kiev has been increasingly reliant on electricity imports to stabilize its power grid, which has been battered by Russian strikes on Ukraine’s dual-use infrastructure. According to Fico, Ukraine received twice as much electricity from Slovakia this January as it did throughout 2025.

The retaliatory move came hours after Hungary vetoed the EU’s latest sanctions on Russia, as well as a proposed €90 billion ($106 billion) emergency loan for Ukraine. Budapest tied the double veto to the Druzhba standoff, accusing Kiev of imposing an “oil blockade” on the country and “blackmailing” it. Last week, both Slovakia and Hungary announced that they would suspend diesel exports to Ukraine until the Druzhba pipeline becomes operational again. Budapest has also mulled cutting emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine.

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“Budapest has also opposed the bloc’s proposed 20th package of sanctions against Russia amid an oil supply row with Kiev..”

• Hungary Vetoes €90 Billion EU Loan For Ukraine (RT)

Hungary has blocked the EU’s proposed €90 billion ($106 billion) emergency loan for Ukraine, as well as the latest package of sanctions on Russia, citing Kiev’s allegedly deliberate disruption of oil supplies to the country. Hungary placed the double veto on the initiatives on Monday as Kiev and Budapest remain locked in a bitter row over the Soviet-era Druzhba oil pipeline – which carries Russian crude to Hungary and Slovakia and has been out of commission since late January. Kiev claims that it was damaged by Russia, which has denied the allegations. Budapest has echoed Moscow’s stance, accusing Kiev of deliberately withholding supplies for political reasons and subjecting the country to an “oil blockade,” and threatening retaliation.


“Ukrainians cannot blackmail us; they cannot jeopardize the security of Hungary’s energy supply by colluding with Brussels and the Hungarian opposition. No, a clear no,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said after a meeting of the bloc’s top diplomats to discuss the loan and sanctions package. EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc’s leadership expected the measures to be approved at the meeting, adding that it was a major setback and a “message we did not want to send today.” The €90 billion loan was agreed to in December, when Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic secured an opt-out scheme, allowing them to not contribute to the scheme financially.

Hungary, as well as the other nation affected by the oil supply disruption, Slovakia, has threatened retaliation over the Druzhba issue, demanding that Kiev resume its operations immediately. Last week, both countries announced that they would suspend diesel exports to Ukraine until the pipeline becomes operational again. This weekend, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico also threatened to stop providing Ukraine with emergency electricity supply unless Kiev restores oil deliveries within two days. Fico said on Monday that he will keep his promise, raising the issue with the nation’s electricity provider. In January alone, Kiev received more emergency electricity from Slovakia than throughout 2025 to stabilize its energy grid amid Russian long-range strikes, he noted. https://twitter.com/HungaryBased/status/2026333804428705922?s=20

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“We don’t hate Ukraine. The problem is that the Ukrainian state hates Hungary..”

• Ukraine Hates Us – Hungary (RT)

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has rejected accusations that Budapest hates Ukraine, suggesting that it’s Kiev that’s been pursuing hostile policies toward his country for years. The remarks came in response to questions from reporters on the sidelines of the EU Foreign Affairs Council, as Hungary threatened to veto the bloc’s latest sanctions package against Russia. When one journalist confronted Szijjarto, suggesting that Hungary should direct its ire at Moscow, the minister offered a scolding response. “We don’t hate Ukraine. The problem is that the Ukrainian state hates Hungary,” Szijjarto said, accusing Kiev of undermining Budapest’s energy security by blocking crude oil supplies via the Druzhba pipeline, among other issues.


At the heart of the dispute is the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline, the main artery carrying Russian crude to Hungary and neighboring Slovakia. As landlocked countries in Central Europe, both are heavily dependent on it. Another journalist charged that Hungary’s Russian oil purchases mean Budapest is “financing the war.” Szijjarto dismissed the claim, pointing out that the value amounts to a mere 0.2% of Russia’s gross domestic product. Later in the day, Hungary followed through and vetoed the sanctions package. Szijjarto said that Budapest would consider lifting its block only when Ukraine resumes oil flow via the Druzhba pipeline. Previously, Budapest halted diesel supplies to Ukraine and threatened to cut off electricity and natural gas.

When the oil flow stopped in late January, Ukraine blamed a Russian airstrike. Moscow, however, insisted that Kiev was using energy as leverage to blackmail the two EU countries, which have been critical of the bloc’s support for Ukraine. The diplomatic dispute between Hungary and Ukraine has escalated in recent weeks, spilling over into personal jabs. Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky launched a string of attacks against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, including fat-shaming him during the Munich Security Conference earlier this month.

Orban, a vocal critic of EU support for Kiev, responded by saying Zelensky’s comments demonstrate why Ukraine “cannot become a member of the European Union.” The Hungarian prime minister has long opposed Ukraine’s push to join the bloc and has repeatedly refused to send it weapons or approve EU military aid, calling for diplomacy instead.

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Between Novichok and Navalny, we’ve come to know we cannot trust one single word from the British government.

And that’s how we also know that Russia did NOT kill Navalny.

• The New Navalny Poison – This Swedish Disinformation is a British Lie (Helmer)

The Swedish Government has admitted it has no direct evidence of the cause of Alexei Navalny’s death – only British Government hearsay.In a series of email exchanges last week, the Swedish Foreign Ministry has revealed that its military laboratories and scientific establishments have not received post-mortem samples of Navalny’s tissues. There has been no Swedish analysis of the toxicology of those samples. There is no Swedish documentation proving in the toxicology of the Navalny samples epibatidine poisoning as the cause of Navalny’s death on February 16, 2024. Forensically speaking, the Swedish Government does not know — cannot know — if Navalny died of natural causes or was poisoned to death. Ten days ago, however, on February 14, the Swedish Government signed with four other states – UK, Germany, France and The Netherlands – an announcement of fact and allegation of murder it had no intention to verify.



“The UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands are confident [sic] that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin,” the statement declared. “This is the conclusion [sic] of our Governments based on analyses [sic] of samples from Alexei Navalny. These analyses have conclusively [sic] confirmed the presence of epibatidine. Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia. Russia claimed that Navalny died of natural causes. But given the toxicity of epibatidine and reported symptoms [sic], poisoning was highly likely the cause of his death. Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him.”

Sic is the old Latin adverb manuscript which editors traditionally used to mark an original word or term that applied to a surprising claim, faulty reasoning, fabrication, or falsehood which the reader might otherwise interpret as a mistake of transcription. No mistake here by the Swedes – this wording is their cover for not being caught at a provable lie. An investigation in Stockholm by lawyer Mats Nilsson, based on Swedish freedom of information law, has produced the record to show that the only conclusion the Swedish Government has reached is to accept that Porton Down, the British Government’s chemical warfare laboratory, which synthesized epibatidine at least a decade ago and has accumulated operational stocks since then, has reported the discovery of that poison in the Navalny samples.

However, the British Government has not transferred these samples to Sweden for investigation. The Swedish Government’s chemical warfare laboratory at Umeå does not confirm it has either received the samples, or analysed them, or reported any findings. Instead, a series of emailed answers from the Swedish Foreign Ministry’s Disarmament Non-proliferation and Export Control (NIS) Unit has repeated the February 14 joint statement allegations. When requested to substantiate them, the Ministry has added a series of disclaimers:

“we will not comment on the details regarding how the samples were obtained. What we can say is that we have high confidence in the integrity of the process… We will not comment on the details of the entities involved in the forensic investigation… We will not comment on the exact details of the identification process. We will not comment on the details regarding how the samples from Navalny were obtained. What we can say is that we have high confidence in the integrity of the chain of custody.”

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https://twitter.com/JimFergusonUK/status/2026006356918992965?s=20 https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2026541355820831115?s=20

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 5 2025

Oct 052025
 
 October 5, 2025  Posted by at 10:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  40 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Corridor In The Asylum 1889

 

• Trump Thanks Israel For Pause in Gaza, Urges Hamas “Move Quickly” (ZH)
• ICE Agents Ambushed, Fired Upon in Chicago Suburb (Spencer)
• US Running Out of Money To Keep Nuclear Arsenal Safe (RT)
• Sen. Kennedy: More Absurd Things Dems Shut Down the Government For (Margolis)
• US To Earn More Than $1 Trillion Per Year In Tariffs – Trump (TASS)
• Putin Blasts French ‘Piracy’ After ‘Russia-Linked’ Tanker Boarded (ZH)
• Shutdown Day #3 – Trump’s Challenge (CTH)
• Putin-the-Unready? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Vladimir Putin Makes The Castling Move (Helmer)
• How the Israel Lobby Took Over America’s Universities (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Trust In US Media At Historic Low – Gallup (RT)
• UK Energy Chief Claims Musk Fueling ‘Threat’ To Britain (RT)
• UK Parliament Cuts Nigel Farage’s Security Detail (RT)
• Musk Tweets Wipe $15bn Off Netflix Value (RT)
• US Treasury Unveils Draft Design Of Coin With Trump’s Profile (RT)
• Higher Ed Bottoms Out (James Howard Kunstler)

 

 


https://twitter.com/nxt888/status/1973843985824428377
https://twitter.com/RussiaIsntEnemy/status/1974475994716127429

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1973850555278921988


https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/1974543229761843473
https://twitter.com/MAGAStormX/status/1974510704343347569

200,000 SIM cards. That takes up a lot of space. Like all buiildings in an entire street.


https://twitter.com/Megatron_ron/status/1974531487128289740

Martin Armstrong: Trump Taking Us Into World War III

 

 

 

 

Nobody believes it until they see it. But Trump may have had enough damage done to his name.

• Trump Thanks Israel For Pause in Gaza, Urges Hamas “Move Quickly” (ZH)

The Israeli military has been ordered by the Netanyahu government to pause its offensive in Gaza City, according to Israeli army radio on Saturday, just a day after Hamas is said to have agreed to the Trump-proposed peace plan which seeks the release of all remaining hostages, living and deceased. The Israeli military in an official statement said it had been ordered to “advance readiness” for implementing the first stage of Trump’s plan. Army radio noted that military operations in Gaza would be scaled back to “the minimum” – but what have been dubbed defensive strikes will continue. Prime Minister Netanyahu says the hostages will be freed in days. Some of these airstrikes were still observed throughout the day, with Palestinian sources saying at least 55 people have still been killed since dawn.

President Trump himself late Friday urged Israel to halt its bombardment, while also calling on Hamas to “move quickly” on implementing the 20-point peace plan. “I appreciate that Israel has temporarily stopped the bombing in order to give the Hostage release and Peace Deal a chance to be completed,” Trump stated on Truth Social Saturday morning. But he also warned that “Hamas must move quickly, or else all bets will be off,” adding that “I will not tolerate delay, which many think will happen, or any outcome where Gaza poses a threat again. Let’s get this done, FAST. Everyone will be treated fairly!” But Hamas had only said it is ready to enter negotiations on Trump’s peace plan, suggesting there are many more hurdles to go as each condition is agreed to.

Prime Minister Netanyahu in fresh remarks to reporters emphasized that the plan calls for the complete demilitarization of Hamas – but this is anything but certain in terms of whether the Palestinian militant group will actually lay down its weapons. But Hamas did say it has agreed to releasing all 48 remaining hostages that it’s ready to surrender power over the Gaza Strip, but the proverbial devil will be in the details in terms of how precisely this all comes to fruition. It remains an open question the degree to which fighting has actually stopped in Gaza City…

The Palestinian side hopes to see 250 prisoners serving life sentences and 1,700 Palestinians detained without charge released as a result of the Trump 20-point plan. Israeli military Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee is meanwhile telling Palestinian residents not to return to their homes in Gaza City or northern Gaza. Still, this moment seems the best shot at truce or permanent peace in the two-year long war in quite a while, and the White House seems ready to seize the initiative and push the sides to the finish line.

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“..Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have spent weeks ratcheting up the hysteria and purveying incendiary rhetoric about how President Donald Trump is a fascist and ICE agents are his storm troopers.”:

• ICE Agents Ambushed, Fired Upon in Chicago Suburb (Spencer)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have reportedly come under fire in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, from a woman identified only as a “U.S. citizen.” This comes after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have spent weeks ratcheting up the hysteria and purveying incendiary rhetoric about how President Donald Trump is a fascist and ICE agents are his storm troopers. Once again, the left’s rhetoric spills over into violence. Fox News reported early Saturday afternoon that according to Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “federal agents were rammed and boxed in by 10 cars in Broadview, Ill., where anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crowds have been gathering for days.”

They haven’t been just gathering, and this was no peaceful protest: “One of the drivers was armed with a semi-automatic weapon, according to McLaughlin, who said officers ‘were forced to deploy their weapons and fire defensive shots at an armed U.S. citizen.’” According once again to McLaughlin, “the armed woman, who was a U.S. citizen, was named in a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) intelligence bulletin.” She “allegedly doxxed agents and posted online, ‘Hey to all my gang let’s f— those motherf—— up, don’t let them take anyone.'”The firefight took place as “agents were reportedly performing a routine patrol in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago.” Reportedly, no agents were injured. Oddly, McLaughlin added that “the woman involved drove herself to the hospital to get care for wounds.” That’s swell, but was she arrested? The question shouldn’t even need to be asked, but in America these days, one never knows.

It should be remembered in connection with this incident that back in April, Pritzker said: “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption — but I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.” It looks as if in Broadview, he has been heeded. Also, on Saturday morning, Pritzker raised the temperature even more, saying: “This morning, the Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will. It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will.” Once again, this is the kind of language that stirs up the left’s most violent cadres.

And Pritzker wasn’t finished. He charged that the Trump administrations intends to “pull hardworking Americans out of their regular jobs and away from their families all to participate in a manufactured performance — not a serious effort the protect public safety.” He insisted that there was “no need for military troops on the ground in the State of Illinois. State, county, and local law enforcement have been working together and coordinating to ensure public safety around the Broadview ICE facility, and to protect people’s ability to peacefully exercise their connotational rights. I will not call up our National Guard to further Trump’s acts of aggression against our people.”

Now, Pritzker appears to have gotten what he wanted, and the seeds he planted and has been watering for so long have finally sprouted: there has been an armed attack against ICE agents in a Chicago suburb. Yet Pritzker shouldn’t get too elated and start savoring being the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate (or who knows, even presidential candidate) in 2028. While he has been energetically purveying his hysterical rhetoric, he has also, ironically enough, completely undercut it.

After all, if officers of the law are not able to do their duty in Chicago, and come under armed attack when they try to do so, it’s clear that Pritzker is wrong: there really is a need for military troops on the ground in the State of Illinois. And the person who is primarily responsible for creating the need for them is Pritzker himself. The Broadview incident comes at a time of rapidly increasing tensions all across the country. Democrat governors such as Pritzker and Gavin Newsom seem determined to keep the pedal to the medal on the hysterical rhetoric, as if they actually want the violence they’re inciting to break out. In a saner age, their defiance of the president and constant incitement would be considered seditious and result in their being removed from office, if not prosecuted. Today, it has them jockeying for the leadership of the Democrat Party.

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More goodies from the shutdown.

• US Running Out of Money To Keep Nuclear Arsenal Safe (RT)

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has cautioned that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) could run out of funding to monitor the country’s nuclear arsenal within eight days because of an ongoing government shutdown. He said operations would be suspended once the money is gone. The US federal government has stopped working for the first time in almost seven years, after Republicans and Democrats failed to agree on a spending bill in the Senate.nOn Friday, the Senate failed to pass either a Republican bill or a Democratic alternative, with both measures falling short of the votes needed. Both sides blamed each other for the crisis. Lawmakers are expected to try again on October 6.

“Eight more days of funding, and then we have to go into some emergency shutdown procedures, putting our country at risk,” Wright said Thursday evening on Fox News, referring to the National Nuclear Security Administration. The secretary said over 20 officials in his department are still awaiting Senate confirmation, blaming Democrats for delaying tactics and prolonging the shutdown by withholding key votes. Before this year’s federal cuts, the NNSA employed more than 65,000 federal workers and contractors nationwide, handling everything from maintaining the nuclear arsenal to non-proliferation efforts and oversight of the US Navy’s nuclear operations.

In its latest shutdown plan, the US Energy Department said it would keep NNSA staff running “critical control operations systems” and those working on nuclear non-proliferation, but gave no figures on how many employees would be included. mUS President Donald Trump has suggested he may use the shutdown to push through major staff and wage cuts, blaming Democrats for the budget impasse. The White House is also using the standoff to target programs opposed by Republicans. Federal agencies have partially suspended services and many employees are furloughed. The last government shutdown began on December 22, 2018 and lasted 35 days.

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$833,000 for transgender people in Nepal.
$300,000 for a pride parade in Lesotho.
$4.2 million for LGBTQI people in the Western Balkans and Uganda.

‘We’re gonna shut down government until you put that back in.’”

• Sen. Kennedy: More Absurd Things Dems Shut Down the Government For (Margolis)

The Schumer Shutdown is dragging into the weekend, with neither side budging. Republicans pushed for a straightforward continuing resolution to keep the government funded through November, but Democrats chose to hold the line for their wish list of radical spending priorities—billions and billions of dollars’ worth—and in doing so, shut the government down. The media has focused on their demand for free health care for illegal immigrants, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more buried in this standoff that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) took to the Senate floor this week and laid out, in his trademark blunt and hilarious fashion, exactly what Democrats are trying to shut the government down over—and it’s every bit as ridiculous as you’d expect.

“Basically, President Trump just said, ‘We want you to take some stuff out of the budget that we think is wasteful,’” Kennedy began. “And we did — and that upset the congresswoman.” That “congresswoman,” of course, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who, according to Kennedy, went ballistic when Trump and congressional Republicans started cutting some of the more absurd Biden-era spending priorities. Kennedy didn’t hold back as he read aloud what Democrats are fighting to restore. “We found that under President Biden, they were spending $3 million for circumcisions and vasectomies in Zambia,” he said. “We took that out. The congresswoman says, ‘We’re gonna shut down government until you put that back in.’”

And that was just the beginning. “We found $500,000 of American taxpayer money for electric buses in Rwanda,” Kennedy continued. “We found $3.6 million for pastry cooking classes and dance focus groups for male prostitutes in Haiti. I kid you not. I’m not making this up. It was in the budget under President Biden.”

Republicans, Kennedy noted, stripped out each of these items as they tried to rein in wasteful foreign spending. But Democrats—with AOC and the “socialist wing” of the party leading the way—are threatening to shut the government down until every last one of those absurd expenditures is put back in. “I could spend the rest of the afternoon here,” Kennedy said. “We took all that out. It upset Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. It upset the socialist wing of her party. And now they’re threatening all other Democrats and saying, ‘You’ve got to shut that government down until we get what we want.’” And that, Kennedy concluded, is what this entire budget fight is about—not defending American taxpayers or funding core government services, but holding the government hostage over millions in woke pet projects and bizarre international handouts.

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“..a protective mechanism.”

• US To Earn More Than $1 Trillion Per Year In Tariffs – Trump (TASS)

US President Donald Trump said that the import duties he imposed would bring the United States revenue of more than $1 trillion per year. In an interview with One America News television channel, Trump stated that revenues from new tariffs were just starting to flow in but eventually they could reach $1 trillion a year. Speaking at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly last month, Trump said the United States was ready to conduct trade with all countries provided that the principles of fairness and reciprocity are respected. According to the US president, the tariffs that the US administration has imposed on most countries of the world are a protective mechanism.

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One fake anti-Russia story after another. They come fast.

• Putin Blasts French ‘Piracy’ After ‘Russia-Linked’ Tanker Boarded (ZH)

“The tanker was seized in neutral waters without any justification, and they were apparently looking for some kind of military cargo, drones, or something else,” Putin said Thursday at the Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi, condemning the French takeover of an oil tanker suspected of being part of Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” which seeks to evade Western energy sanctions as an act of “piracy”. “There’s nothing there, there ne ver was, and there can’t be anything,” Putin asserted of the boarding action which took place earlier this week. The tanker was under the flag of a third country and the crew is international, Putin described, adding he doesn’t know “how much it’s related to Russia.” French authorities revealed details for the first time on Thursday, confirming that they arrested the captain, a Chinese national. He’s accused of disobeying orders of the French navy.

Another crew member, the First Officer, was also arrested, as Reuters details of French statements: French police have arrested the captain and first officer of a sanctioned tanker suspected of operating for Russia’s “shadow fleet,” authorities said on Thursday, after the navy boarded the vessel, which may have been involved in recent drone incidents around Denmark. The vessel, the Boracay, was approximately 50 nautical miles south of Copenhagen on September 22 when drone activity forced the closure of the city’s airport around 1830 GMT, according to data from MarineTraffic. It was also observed heading south along Denmark’s western coast on the evening of September 24 when drones were reported flying north of Esbjerg and near several nearby airports. The tanker appeared on on an EU sanctions list for transporting Russian oil, but the whole Denmark drone incursion linkage aspect to it seems highly coincidental, and a big stretch, assuming there’s no further evidence and that no actual drones were found upon searching the vessel.

French authorities would be presenting any such evidence very quickly, but instead they just issued ambiguous statements remotely suggesting the linkage to the Denmark drone sightings.French authorities say that the Boracay has a history of changing names and flags, and is currently flying under Benin’s registry. It’s believed this is part of intentional sanctions-dodging. The Boracay is now anchored off France’s coast near Saint-Nazaire, south of Brest. It had initially set sail from the Russian port of Primorsk outside Saint Petersburg on September 20 and had actually been at one point detained Estonian authorities earlier this year for sailing without a valid country flag. International law allows countries to intercept such vessels which are believed to be stateless, typically if there is suspicion of wrong-doing like smuggling.

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“If liberty and freedom become the priority, the advancement of personal wealth becomes more difficult.”

• Shutdown Day #3 – Trump’s Challenge (CTH)

The professionally Republican wing of the GOPe want this shutdown ended just as much as the professionally Democrat wing. The UniParty cannot allow Trump/Vought this much power. Republicans cannot allow Trump this much power. The Moonbat leftists are not the biggest problem, they never have been. They are ideologues, mostly. Insufferable, stupid, violent at times, but easy to spot. Remember, Democrats quest for power; Republicans quest for money. Always underline this because it’s really important. The Moonbat leftists seek power, seek control of your life, and they are open in their insufferably stupid arguments to get there. When they start to lose, they turn violent. This is their history. That said, they are not the most dangerous. The professional Republicans are more dangerous because their priority is money. As a result, their approaches, goals, objectives and arguments can be purchased.

Republicans have no interests, goals or objectives, nor allegiances, that supersede their primary objective, getting money, growing their wealth. Democrats will come at you with a knife, a gun or a baseball bat. You can see them. The professional Republican guy standing beside you, however, is willing to take a payment to shoot you in the ear when you don’t see it coming. This is also why it seems like Democrats stick together, and Republicans split. Democrats are chasing a common goal, a collective goal, power. Republicans are chasing a commonality, yes, but an individual goal, money, their wealth. Donors contribute to the Democrat agenda because their interest to benefit from power. Republicans modify their agenda to benefit donors because their goal is money. Democrats stay on task, power. Republicans are flexible, money.

You enter a war against Leftists with extreme danger. However, the danger is not the war in front of you, it’s the army beside you waiting to get a payment from the enemy in front of you. Out of a group of 1,000 democrats, 900+ will join in to defend a weakened Moonbat leftist (see Kimmell). Out of a group of 1,000 Republicans you will find, maybe, 5 willing to cover your back regardless of how much bribery is put in front of them. Remember this, understand this and the reality of who presents the most danger to us is accurately framed. Republicans do not simply snatch defeat from the jaws of victory; they sell defeat to the highest bidder! In our lifetime we have watched this unfold. There were Democrats with the same outlook as Republicans, they were known as “blue dog” democrats. The Blue Dogs were willing to compromise power, to sell power, in return for financial payment.

Traditional ‘Blue Dogs’ were names like Hillary and Bill Clinton; their prism was the assembly of money. However, this group faced the introduction of hardline ideological believers, the communists or Marxists represented by Barack Obama. Obama Inc. battled Clinton Inc. to determine the future of the Democrats. The ideologues won, and the democrat Blue Dogs in their tribe, those willing to concede ideology for money, were purged from their ranks. Modern Democrats, post Obama takeover, are now pure ideologues. “By any means necessary” is the operational objective of modern leftists. This is why government under Obama flipped the switch so openly and began weaponizing power. Purging govt agencies and replacing the staff with ideologues. Crushing opposition, by brute force and targeting.

Simultaneously, in the smaller Republican ranks, there was a small group who wanted to face down the same battle inside the Republican party. The original Tea Party represented this group. A smaller assembly trying to put ideology, freedom and liberty at the forefront of the Republican objective. Unlike the leftist effort, the Tea Party effort inside the Republican party failed. Republican leadership crushed the liberty rebellion and went back to business taking money from the ideological Marxists who now ruled the centers of power. People who didn’t quite understand what was taking place stood and watched, frustrated, at the dynamic of Republicans who conceded every battle to the left. What the abused GOP viewers didn’t understand was the core of the issue; Democrats want power, Republicans want money. Each time the Republicans could win on a policy issue, they sold the loss to Democrats.

Battered conservatives grew more frustrated and more frustrated. Now we enter the era of MAGA, represented by billionaire Donald J Trump, who, like Obama before him, began the fight inside the Republican Party. The Tea Party rebellion quickly reengaged Trump and formed MAGA; the ideological fight inside the Republican party, liberty over money, was on again. MAGA represents opposition to the leftist ideological advancement. But the Republican assembly will not concede. In a way their resistance makes sense. If liberty and freedom become the priority, the advancement of personal wealth becomes more difficult. Simultaneously, if retention and assembly of wealth is the priority, liberty and freedom ideologues become impediments. Again, MAGA within Republicanism must be crushed when money is the priority.

This internal Republican battle has been unfolding in various reference points for almost a decade now, while the internal Democrat battle was long ago decided. The root issue the within the Republican apparatus still surrounds the greatest evil. ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ This conflict has not yet been fully decided, yet admittedly -and thankfully- MAGA has made some significant gains. The Republican party now has a lower income demographic and a more ideological working-class base. However, don’t be fooled. The top tier of the Republican apparatus is mostly unchanged; albeit they are facing more entrenched ideological opposition from the awakened MAGA forces. The top tier will still sell out the base, still compromise for personal profit, and still take payment for policy. This brings us to where we are today.

Inside the MAGA assembly we are trying to identify which Republican leaders have shifted to the MAGA/liberty viewpoint, and which Republican leaders are playing the long game while retaining their DNA level objective, get money. Each day on these pages and many others, the ‘trust’ factor is raised; this is completely understandable. We have a strong muscle memory for betrayal, and we all bear the scars to remind us. It is fitting and proper that these conversations take place. After all, it’s interesting to watch professional Republicans discuss how agencies like the DOJ and FBI have lost institutional trust of the American people due to corruption, while simultaneously those same Republicans never note trust loss within the Republican party as a result of their willful blindness to it.

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“The Russians simply cannot comprehend that they are targeted as an obstacle to Western hegemony.”

• Putin-the-Unready? (Paul Craig Roberts)

Leaders of European countries with limited military ability are openly declaring their preparation for war with Russia. The Baltic states, Poland, Netherlands, France, Germany, and the UK speak if they look forward to a war that would utterly destroy them. It is a mystery as Russia poses no threat to them and wants nothing from them but a mutual security agreement. I believe Putin himself has responsibility for this state of affairs. Putin’s efforts to restrain the conflict in Ukraine have been misunderstood. Putin is perceived as irresolute and the Russian military as incapable. Trump calls Russia a paper tiger and speaks of Ukraine with sufficient European help transitioning from the defense to the offense and invading Russia.

This extremely dangerous way of thinking is the reason I have often said that Putin’s never-ending, ever-widening war was a strategic blunder, a blunder that Putin continues to make. With European politicians declaring their preparation for war, is Putin paying attention, or will he again be Putin-the-Unready as he was in South Ossetia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, in 2022 when Russia was forced to intervene in Donbas, and when the Russian strategic bomber force was attacked on June 1, 2025? Putin’s restraint and Lavrov’s pleading for negotiations have convinced the West that Russia is an easy target. This mistaken conviction is fomenting a major war.

Russians do not seem to understand the situation. This morning on RT political analyst Nadezhda Romanenko attributes the Western war talk to “Western anxieties and domestic political calculations.” It would be more realistic to attribute the war talk to setting up Russia as an aggressor that must be deterred. The Russians simply cannot comprehend that they are targeted as an obstacle to Western hegemony. Everywhere in the West the image that is maintained is Russian aggression. Wikipedia, for example, describes the 2008 Russian war with Georgia as Russian aggression, the 2022 intervention in Donbas as a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Estonia and Poland recently made claims of Russian entry into their air space. Every possible sign of Russian aggression is created. The West is uninterested in Putin’s reassurances. Why is Russia unable to understand this?

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Speeches at the Valdai club are important.

• Vladimir Putin Makes The Castling Move (Helmer)

On June 30, 2021, during his Direct Line programme, President Vladimir Putin was asked what games he liked to play during his schooldays. “I am tempted to say chess,” he replied, “but, unfortunately, it was not chess.” Four years have gone by until his appearance yesterday at the Valdai Club, when the president was asked the same question. He replied: “Well, I loved chess.” Putin was castling.

In the ancient game of chess the move which is known by this name is a relatively new one. The rules to allow it also took centuries to develop. The purpose of castling is defence when the king is under attack and there is safe space between the king and the castle (rook), so that they can exchange places and the king retreat to the safer margin of the board. The opportunity created thereby is for the rook to move more actively into the counter-attack against the adversary. The castling king is delegating the offensive to his rook.

To understand what Putin’s castling means on the board today, read what he said first about the Board of Peace (BOP) Gaza plan of President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-prime minister Tony Blair. “Russia always supports and welcomes any steps by Trump,” he told his spokesman to say, “that seek to avert the tragedy that is now unfolding. We want this plan to be realized, so that it may help steer events in the Middle East toward a peaceful path”.

As this was being interpreted outside the Kremlin wall as Putin’s unqualified endorsement, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced it was too soon for that. “We have not seen this plan. We have only heard comments about its contents. You have now outlined its main provisions. I have heard that this international body, which is intended to ‘temporarily govern Gaza’, is planned to be headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair. He himself seems to have already announced this. I reiterate, I am not privy to the details. I do not know what powers he will be granted, nor how the Arab countries view this. I am aware that some of them have already welcomed the ‘Donald Trump plan’. However, a final assessment can only be made once we know the views of all of Palestine’s neighbours, Israel, the countries of the region, the League of Arab States, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and, above all, the Palestinians themselves. I have heard that representatives of the Palestinian National Authority are not being considered for inclusion in this temporary body, even as observers.”

“Regarding the international security forces,” Lavrov went on. “No, we have not been invited to participate. I reiterate, we only became aware of this new plan yesterday. However, I have read that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commenting on the ‘Trump plan’ – which was announced following Netanyahu’s visit to Washington – said that the plan is good and should not be altered. He claimed that Hamas and everyone else should agree to it. Among the positive aspects of this plan, he stated that Israel would retain control over security in Gaza. This somewhat contradicts the establishment of international forces, so all the details need to be clarified first.”

Lavrov said that at the Valdai Club conference in Sochi. Two days later, Putin has followed him on to the same platform; he also followed the foreign minister on the Gaza plan. Asked about this, Putin started by saying that “now that we are getting acquainted with President Trump’s initiatives, I think there is a light at the end of the tunnel that may still appear”. On Tuesday Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov had mistaken the tunnel for the light. Putin went on to clarify:“The situation in Gaza is a terrible event in history, in modern history. And even someone known as the pro-western Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Guterres, publicly says Gaza has become the largest children’s cemetery in the world. What could be more tragic and sad?”

About Trump’s Gaza plan, “you know, it will probably come as a surprise to you, but on the whole, Russia is ready to support him. If, of course, as we have to look carefully at the proposals made, it will lead to the final goal, which we have always talked about. Russia has always advocated the creation of two states: Israel and a Palestinian state, starting in 1948 and then in 1974, when the relevant UN Security Council resolution was adopted. And this, in my opinion, is the key to a final solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

“Indeed, as far as I know, I have not looked at this proposal so carefully yet, but it proposes to create an international body that will govern Palestine, more precisely the Gaza Strip, for some time, and Mr. Blair should be at its head. He’s not known as a great peacemaker, but I know him personally. Moreover, I visited him, spent the night at his house, we had coffee in our pajamas in the morning, and so on. Yes, yes.”

“Fyodor Lukyanov: Was the coffee good?”

“Yes, quite. But what do I want to say? He is a man with his own views, but he is an experienced politician. And in general, of course, if his activities, his experience, and his knowledge are directed towards a peaceful course, then he can play some positive role. There are, of course, several questions. First: How long will this international administration work? How and to whom will power be transferred later? As far as I understand, this plan outlines the possibility of transferring power to the Palestinian Authority. In my opinion, it would be better, of course, to put everything under the control of President [Mahmoud] Abbas and the current Palestinian administration. It may be difficult for them to resolve the security issues. But so far as I can imagine, my colleagues, with whom I spoke on this topic today, envisage the possibility of transferring control over the Gaza Strip, including to the local militia, to ensure security. Is this bad? In my opinion, this is a good thing.”

“We need to understand, I repeat, how long the international administration will manage there, in what time frame it is supposed to transfer both civil power and security issues, which is very important. And, in my opinion, this should definitely be supported. We are talking about freeing all the hostages held by Hamas, on the one hand, and releasing a significant number of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. Here, too, we need to understand how many Palestinians, whom, and at what time can we release them? And of course, you know, the most important question is: how does Palestine feel about this? That’s exactly what you need to understand. And the countries of the region, the entire Islamic world, and Palestine itself, the Palestinians themselves, including, of course, Hamas. They treat Hamas differently there, and we have our own attitude, but we have contacts with Hamas. It is important for us that Hamas also supports this, and the Palestinian Authority supports it. But these are all issues that require painstaking, careful research.”

“In general, if this happens, it will, of course, be a very serious step forward in resolving the conflict. But, I repeat, in our opinion, fundamentally it can be resolved only with the creation of a Palestinian state. Of course, Israel’s attitude towards this is also important. We don’t know yet either: how did Israel take it? I do not even know of any public statements on this subject, I just did not have time to look at it. But it’s not even public statements that are important, but in fact how the Israeli leadership will treat this, whether it will fulfill everything that the President of the United States has proposed. There are a lot of questions. But in general, if all these positive things that I mentioned happen, then this is, of course, a breakthrough. And a breakthrough can be very positive. I repeat for the third time: the creation of a Palestinian state is a key element of the settlement as a whole.”

Putin was acknowledging that since Peskov’s announcement, he had been briefed by Lavrov and others, and that they had persuaded him to change his mind on what to say. The President concedes now that Russian policy on the Trump plan has not been decided yet; that it will be a collective one with his “colleagues”; and that he is delegating the next moves to them and to their “painstaking, careful research.” This is castling by the king for the rook.

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” The definition of what constitutes anti-semitism has been constantly expanded and now includes truth itself.”

• How the Israel Lobby Took Over America’s Universities (Paul Craig Roberts)

Cornell University, once a place of discussion and learning, is seeking to remove a tenured Jewish professor, Eric Cheyfitz, who permits Israel to be discussed instead of simply praised. The professor’s daughter and granddaughter live in Israel. But this doesn’t save him from being charged with discrimination against a Jewish graduate student. The professor’s trouble was brought to him by an Israeli student who previously served in Israel’s elite military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. None of the students support the Israeli student’s claim. It seems the Israel Lobby is testing how far it can expand its power over America’s universities. If the Lobby can get Cornell University to punish a tenured Jewish professor based on a complaint by a former member of Israeli Military Surveillance, then Israel will have set the standard for American universities that truth about Israel constitutes anti-semitic discrimination and is punishable.

The Israel Lobby took over American universities with large monetary grants. Now dependent on these grants, university administrators have to follow the line. This is how the takeover happened: First came large monetary donations from Jews. These donations led to the appointment of Jewish benefactors to the university’s board of trustees. From here the Jews obtained university administrations headed by Jewish presidents who attached anti-semitism to the woke anti-racist, anti-homophobic, etc. agenda. The definition of what constitutes anti-semitism has been constantly expanded and now includes truth itself.

Several years ago a list was published of the ethnicity of the leadership of Ivy League universities. Formerly a WASP preserve, every Ivy League university had a Jewish president or provost. They may have been outstanding leaders. The point is that for such a small ethnic minority to be in control of all of America’s elite universities cannot be a coincidence. Jews want power and are good at attaining it. In a way you have to admire their determination. It didn’t take the Israel Lobby but a day or two to take over Charlie Kirk’s organization. Presumably, this puts Christian evangelicals back into Israel’s pockets, thus solidifying Israel’s control over President Trump. American WASPs are no longer contenders. Worn out, ambition eroded by trust funds, WASPs have been displaced. Our future seems to in the hands of the Israel Lobby or the immigrant-invaders.

https://israelpalestinenews.org/cornell-cut-classes-by-a-pro-palestinian-professor/

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“..more than 90% of evening newscast stories about [Trump] on ABC, NBC, and CBS were unfavorable.”

• Trust In US Media At Historic Low – Gallup (RT)

Americans’ confidence in the mass media has sunk to a record low, with fewer than three in ten now trusting news outlets to report fairly, according to a new Gallup poll. A poll conducted in September of 1,000 adults showed that only 28% expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio, down from 31% last year, 40% five years ago, and almost 70% in the 1970s. Meanwhile, 36% reported “not very much” confidence and 34% said they had “none at all.” For the first time, confidence among Republicans has collapsed into single digits, with only 8% saying they trust the media. However, 51% of Democrats believed media reporting.

US President Donald Trump’s rocky relationship with the press has reportedly fueled these splits. A Harvard Kennedy School study found that Trump’s first 100 days in office drew overwhelmingly negative coverage, while the Media Research Center recently estimated that more than 90% of evening newscast stories about him on ABC, NBC, and CBS were unfavorable.

On the 100th day of his second term this year, Trump’s administration issued a press release titled “100 Days of Hoaxes,” accusing major outlets of spreading “a nonstop deluge of hoaxes and lies” and listed 48 reports it deemed false. Beyond partisan politics, structural shifts are also eroding traditional media. A Reuters Institute report in June suggested that podcasters and AI chatbots are playing a growing role in news dissemination, with more than half of Americans under 35 relying on social and video networks as their main sources of information.

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Evey Brit knows what Musk is talking about.

• UK Energy Chief Claims Musk Fueling ‘Threat’ To Britain (RT)

UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has accused Elon Musk of posing a major threat to Britain, claiming the billionaire backs nationalist forces seeking to undermine the country. Speaking at the Labour Party conference on Wednesday, the former party leader linked Musk to Nigel Farage, whose Reform UK party gained traction in the May local elections. The US-based entrepreneur has expressed support for the party, but has urged Farage to step down. According to Miliband, Farage is “a key part of a global network that wants to destroy the ties that bind our communities and our way of life.” He added: “I can sum up the threat for you in two words: Elon Musk.” Miliband alleged that Musk “incites violence on our streets,” “calls for the overthrow of our elected government,” and enables “disinformation through X” – the microblogging platform that the billionaire purchased in 2022.

“We have a message for Elon Musk. Get the hell out of our politics and our country.” Musk appeared unfazed by the remarks. Shortly after the speech, he blasted Prime Minister Keir Starmer, calling him “an actor with an empty head” who merely repeats talking points supplied by others. Musk and Starmer have engaged in a months-long feud over the UK’s grooming gang scandal. In June, Starmer authorized a new national inquiry into the mass sexual exploitation of British girls, crimes largely linked to gangs of Pakistani men over a decade ago. Musk accused the prime minister of being “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.”

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When you’re more popular than the PM.

But still… That PM paints a big -political- target on his own back.

• UK Parliament Cuts Nigel Farage’s Security Detail (RT)

UK parliamentary authorities drastically slashed government-funded security for Nigel Farage, an MP and the leader of a major opposition right-wing party, Reform UK, its head of policy has claimed. Zia Yusuf accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of deliberately putting his political rival at risk of attack. Speaking to Times Radio on Wednesday, Yusuf stated that “two weeks ago, the authorities cut Nigel’s security detail by 75 per cent,” without providing any reasons for the decision. The Reform UK representative added that “donors have stepped in [to]… make sure that Nigel is well protected.” However, “if anything was to happen to Nigel, we will hold Keir Starmer squarely responsible,” Yusuf stressed.Yusuf further accused the sitting prime minister of inciting violence against the “man who is the bookmaker’s favorite to be the next prime minister.”

Farage himself acknowledged he feared for his own security and that of other party members after Starmer’s latest attack. Speaking during the Labour Party conference on Tuesday, the prime minister dubbed Farage a “snake oil merchant” who does not like Britain because of his “racist” plans to curb immigration. Starmer charged that Britain must “go into that battle armed, not just with words and condemnation, but with action,” describing Reform UK as the “enemy of national renewal” and the “biggest threat we face.” On Thursday, The Telegraph reported that veteran Conservative MP Sir David Davis had asked Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to “review the decision at the earliest opportunity.”

“It strikes me that Mr Farage is a particularly high-profile target, arguably at greater risk than many Cabinet ministers,” the lawmaker reportedly wrote in a letter. An Ipsos poll last month indicated that Starmer’s popularity had hit a record low, with 79% of Britons disapproving of his performance. Another survey by think tank More in Common suggested around the same time that Farage would become prime minister with 373 MPs if an election were held tomorrow. The Labour, in contrast, would suffer its worst electoral defeat since 1931, securing less than 100 seats in the House of Commons, according to the poll.

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“Transgender propaganda isn’t just quietly lurking in the background on Netflix. They are actively pushing it on users.”

• Musk Tweets Wipe $15bn Off Netflix Value (RT)

US streaming giant Netflix has lost about $15 billion in market value after billionaire Elon Musk accused the platform of “woke bias” and urged his followers to cancel subscriptions. Netflix shares fell 4.3% in a day and a half to $1,140 by midday Thursday, cutting its market cap to $483 billion from $498 billion on Wednesday, trading data showed. The drop came after Musk called on users to boycott Netflix over the animated show ‘Dead End: Paranormal Park’, which features a transgender character. Although canceled in 2023 after two seasons, the show remains available on the platform with a TV-Y7 rating for children seven and older.

Musk’s campaign began on Tuesday when he reposted a clip on X showing one of the show’s characters identifying as transgender. “Dead End Paranormal Park, a show on Netflix, is pushing pro-transgender on CHILDREN. This show is advertised for 7-YEAR-OLDS,” the account said. Musk replied: “this is not ok.” He later reposted messages from users claiming to have canceled Netflix and accused the service of pushing “LGBTQ+ propaganda.” On Wednesday, he wrote: “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids.” In another post, he said: “Transgender propaganda isn’t just quietly lurking in the background on Netflix. They are actively pushing it on users.” Musk has long railed against wokeism and LGBTQ messaging, which many link to his estrangement from his trans child, Vivian Wilson, who has openly criticized the billionaire for his alleged anti-trans vendetta.

In a Washington Post interview last year, Musk said that to him Wilson was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” Netflix has not responded to Musk’s remarks. The company has previously defended controversial content on free speech grounds, including in 2020, when its film ‘Cuties’ drew outrage for sexualized depictions of underage actors. By Thursday’s close, the firm had pared some of the losses, ending at $1,161 a share with a $493 billion valuation. While stock is down 4% this week, it remains up 30% year-to-date. Analysts expect Musk’s campaign will not weigh on the company long-term, suggesting that Netflix shares are too costly to be seriously affected by online backlash.

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“Despite the radical left’s forced shutdown of our government, the facts are clear: Under the historic leadership of President Donald J. Trump, our nation is entering its 250th anniversary stronger, more prosperous, and better than ever before..”

Reason to celebrate!

• US Treasury Unveils Draft Design Of Coin With Trump’s Profile (RT)

The US Treasury Department is considering putting an image of US President Donald Trump on a one-dollar coin marking the 250th anniversary of America’s independence. According to the first design draft revealed on Friday, the coin features Trump’s profile on one side, along with the words “Liberty” and “In God we trust,” and the dates 1776–2026. The other side shows Trump raising a clenched fist against a backdrop of the US flag, with the inscriptions “Fight, fight, fight,” “United States of America,” and “E pluribus unum.” The image is a clear homage to a photo taken by AP’s Evan Vucci shortly after Trump’s failed assassination attempt in July 2024, which was widely republished in US and international media.

“Despite the radical left’s forced shutdown of our government, the facts are clear: Under the historic leadership of President Donald J. Trump, our nation is entering its 250th anniversary stronger, more prosperous, and better than ever before,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said in a statement. “While a final $1 coin design has not yet been selected to commemorate the United States’ semiquincentennial, this first draft reflects the enduring spirit of our country and democracy, even in the face of immense obstacles,” the spokesperson added. According to the Washington Post, existing US law generally prohibits depictions of living people on currency. In addition, the 2020 Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act, which authorized the minting of the anniversary coin, prohibits busts or portraits of people on the reverse side.

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“There are so many disgusting animals in public life that we have allowed to fraternize with the rest of society to our absolute peril.” Aimee Terese on “X”

• Higher Ed Bottoms Out (James Howard Kunstler)

Harvard, apparently, can never learn. It has made itself the poster-child for all the failures of contemporary education, including the racketeering around endowments, government grant grifts, race and gender hustles, and intellectual surrender to ideas that would make medieval astrologasters burst out laughing. Case in point: the university lately announced the hiring of a Boston-area drag-queen to teach a course in the spring semester of 2026 about the TV show known as Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The show features contestants vying for prizes and crowns based on “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent” (C.U.N.T.). Get the picture? Reach into your Jungian psychology tool-bag.

This backwater of the arts was identified some years ago by the literary pop-star Susan Sontag as “camp” derived from the French se camper “to pose in an exaggerated fashion” depicting “unnatural artifice.” Camp is the theatrical cousin of kitsch, which is the celebration of bad taste, with histrionic overtones of exaggerated sentimentality. Please understand: when you are watching drag-queens, you are not really seeing men posing as women. You are seeing men portraying women as monsters. You might surmise that these are men who labor under “mommy issues.” The giveaway is that they often banter onstage humorously about their male genitalia, and sometimes even attempt sneaky displays of such, which opens that behavior to interesting interpretations.

Harvard’s drag-queen du jour demonstrates all that nicely. Kareem Khubchandani, his legal name, is a professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University. He also teaches “Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.” As a drag star, he goes by the stage-name LaWhore Vagistan. This is how he describes himself to the news media: “[M]y preferred pronouns are ‘she’ or ‘aunty.’ I chose ‘LaWhore’ because my family traces its origins to Pakistan: Lahore is an important city in Pakistan, and well, I’m a bit of a whore. And Vagistan because I see the subcontinent as one, big, beautiful Vag … istan.” Of course, his fascination with female genitalia, of seeing a whole nation in that guise, is a bit odd considering that A) he is a homosexual performer who is ostensibly not attracted to female sexual characteristics and lacks experience with them, and B) he is a male of the species who does not possess such organs himself.

Therefore, on what basis would he have gained so much knowledge of female genitalia and developed such a powerful obsession around them as to imagine the whole country of his ancestors that way? Possibly, it has something to do with mommy. . . something that made her appear. . . unforgettably monstrous. We will probably never know the answer to these quandaries, and they are somewhat secondary to the main question of Mr. Khubchandani’s employment in this connection at Harvard where young minds get molded to become the future managerial class of our nation. Other questions do present, though. For instance, did Harvard’s President Alan Garber know about this hire and sign off on it, and how would he say it fits Harvard’s mission? Or Provost John Manning? Or Hopi E. Hoekstra, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences? Or Harvard’s Board of Governors?

All this underscores an important lesson that America has apparently managed to unlearn, something that we once knew quite well: that marginal behavior belongs on the margins, not in the center of our national life. The celebration of vulgarity for its own sake is arguably not the highest aspirational ideal for the best-and-the-brightest of our society, however amusing it might be in their hours of leisure, when people are free to pursue whatever lights their imaginations. It also raises the question as to why would highly-educated women, say, the female faculty and admins at Harvard, virtually all PhDs, certified geniuses in their fields, go along with such a garish display of farcical disrespect for the female of the species, being officially showcased as part of Harvard’s curriculum? Do they see themselves as monsters who deserve mockery and objurgation?

Do they enjoy watching a man enact such degrading psychodrama so as to diminish his manhood altogether? Does it signify some sort of conclusive triumph over “the Patriarchy?” (And how much of a good thing is that?) Harvard happens to have a Psychology Department, including a PhD program in Clinical Science, Social Psychology, and Cognition, Brain, and Behavior, under chairman Matthew K. Nock, PhD. His official Harvard bio states: “Nock’s research is aimed at advancing the understanding of why people behave in ways that are harmful to themselves, with an emphasis on suicide and other forms of self-harm. . . to better understand how these behaviors develop, how to predict them, and how to prevent their occurrence.” Perhaps President Garber should ask Dr. Nock to audit LaWhore Vagistan’s upcoming course to see, for instance, how it speaks to the epidemic of transgender violence currently plaguing the USA. We need all the insight we can get.

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Kudu
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1973996436506214643

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 17 2018

Jul 172018
 
 July 17, 2018  Posted by at 8:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


René Magritte The human condition 1935

 

• IMF Warns Trump Trade War Could Cost Global Economy $430 Billion (G.)
• Detente Bad, Cold War Good (Murray)
• Mueller’s Latest Indictment Contradicts Evidence In The Public Domain (Carter)
• Has Mueller Caught the Hackers? (RN/NC)
• Putin Rejects UK’s ‘Ungrounded Accusations’ Over Novichok Poisoning (AFP)
• Vote Leave Fined For Breaking Electoral Law (BBC)
• May Narrowly Heads Off Defeat After Caving In To Brexit Hardliners (G.)
• Brexit Is Like The Python That Swallowed An Alligator (Ind.)
• Theresa May Told Her Chequers Deal Is ‘Dead In The Water’ (Ind.)
• IRS To Revoke 362,000 Passports From US Citizens (Black)
• Going Cashless Is Discriminatory (G.)
• Netflix Stock Slammed As Subscriber Growth And Revenue Fall Short (MW)
• Airbnb Warned It Breaches EU Rules Over Pricing Policy (G.)
• High Housing Costs Prompt Thousands of Greeks To Disclaim Inheritance (K.)

 

 

US “as the focus of global retaliation”..

• IMF Warns Trump Trade War Could Cost Global Economy $430 Billion (G.)

Rising trade tensions between the United States and the rest of the world could cost the global economy $430bn, with America “especially vulnerable” to an escalating tariff war, the International Monetary Fund has warned. Delivering a sharp rebuke for Donald Trump, the Washington-based organisation said the current threats made by the US and its trading partners risked lowering global growth by as much as 0.5% by 2020, or about $430bn in lost GDP worldwide. Although all economies would suffer from further escalation, the US would find itself “as the focus of global retaliation” with a relatively higher share of its exports taxed in global markets. “It is therefore especially vulnerable,” the fund said.

Trump raised the stakes in his mounting trade dispute with China last week by proposing 10% tariffs on $200bn of Chinese goods entering the country, on top of $34bn of tariffs that were officially imposed on Beijing at the beginning of the month. The Chinese government, which hit back at the first wave of US tariffs with similar measures, was quick to warn of further retaliation on Monday.[..] Issuing its latest World Economic Outlook report on Monday amid the rising tensions, the IMF said there were greater risks emerging for the global economy since its last assessment in the spring. Although world growth remains strong, the expansion is “becoming less even, and risks to the outlook are mounting”, it said.

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So much vitriol these days. Craig Murray is one of many to tone it down.

• Detente Bad, Cold War Good (Murray)

The entire “liberal” media and political establishment of the Western world reveals its militarist, authoritarian soul today with the screaming and hysterical attacks on the very prospect of detente with Russia. Peace apparently is a terrible thing; a renewed arms race, with quite literally trillions of dollars pumped into the military industrial complex and hundreds of thousands dying in proxy wars, is apparently the “liberal” stance. Political memories are short, but just 15 years after Iraq was destroyed and the chain reaction sent most of the Arab world back to the dark ages, it is now “treason” to question the word of the Western intelligence agencies, which deliberately and knowingly produced a fabric of lies on Iraqi WMD to justify that destruction.

It would be more rational for it to be treason for leaders to blindly accept the word of the intelligence services. This is especially true on “Russia hacking the election” when, after three years of crazed accusations and millions of man hours by lawyers and CIA and FBI investigators, they are yet to produce any substantive evidence of accusations which are plainly nuts in the first place. This ridiculous circus has found a few facebook ads and indicted one Russian for every 100,000 man hours worked, for unspecified or minor actions which had no possible bearing on the election result.

There are in fact genuine acts of election rigging to investigate. In particular, the multiple actions of the DNC and Democratic Party establishment to rig the Primary against Bernie Sanders do have some very real documentary evidence to substantiate them, and that evidence is even public. Yet those real acts of election rigging are ignored and instead the huge investigation is focused on catching those who revealed Hillary’s election rigging. This gets even more absurd – the investigation then quite deliberately does not focus on catching whoever leaked Hillary’s election rigging, but instead seeks to prove that the Russians hacked Hillary’s election-rigging, which I can assure you they did not. Meanwhile, those of us who might help them with the truth if they were actually interested, are not questioned at all.

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Excellent point by point take-down of the entire indictment.

• Mueller’s Latest Indictment Contradicts Evidence In The Public Domain (Carter)

Mueller’s indictment leaves us with the premise that a supposed GRU officer working in league with other GRU officers, acquiring Podesta’s attachments and, just three days after Julian Assange announces leaks are coming in relation to Hillary Clinton, releases deliberately tainted files that serve to pin the blame on Russians, that only really hurt Trump, that ultimately undermined leaks and that provided fabricated evidence. Evidence that, for whatever reason, supported several claims made by CrowdStrike executives published in a legacy media article the previous day.

Guccifer 2.0 repeatedly tried to associate his efforts with WikiLeaks (from the day he appeared) – an organization for whistleblowers to be able to leak files anonymously. Something a hacker willing to publish leaks on his own blog would have had no need for, especially not if he was connected to a site that published leaks already (that is, DCLeaks.com). What we know about Guccifer 2.0 and his multi-layered efforts to be seen as Russian destroy the notion that he was anyone operating on the side of the Russian state.

Ultimately, the indictment produces a lot of new claims, many in keeping with what we know or have heard, however, it presents no evidence to support what it has introduced and an indictment by itself is not evidence, points that have already been noted by Consortium News, Moon of Alabama, Mark McCarty and others. They have also picked up on the timing of the indictment, which seems to have become a theme for Mueller’s indictments in particular. This latest example comes immediately following Rosenstein and Strzok being grilled and receiving negative press as well as immediately before Trump’s summit with Putin. Exactly how much of the indictment is bogus, I can’t know for sure, but definitely, some of it is, especially those parts that relate to the Guccifer 2.0 persona “being on Russia’s side” in all of this.

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The whole WMD presentation lost Mueller his right to be believed at face value.

• Has Mueller Caught the Hackers? (RN/NC)

AARON MATE: Right. So, then let me ask you, Michael, this question, this belief that Putin personally ordered this interference campaign against the U.S. The strongest evidence to bolster it that I’ve seen was this Washington Post report in June 2017, I believe, that said that the U.S. had a mole inside Putin’s inner circle who reported that he personally instructed this operation to happen. Doesn’t that strike you as odd, that, well A, that the U.S. could penetrate Putin’s inner circle at that high level, and B, if they did, that they’d be willing to disclose that in a media report, thereby potentially compromising this incredibly sensitive source of information?

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Now, you read Russian Roulette and you read about the secret source they had inside the Kremlin in 2014, who was warning the U.S. government that this is exactly what Putin’s government was up to. And this is what they were planning. And I know exactly. I know, we know a lot more about that secret source than we put in the book. This was something that was vetted very carefully. But it is not at all unusual that American spy agencies would seek to cultivate and develop sources who can provide insight into what Putin’s up to, and in these cases they clearly did.

AARON MATE: Someone claims they did. I just find it shocking that they would publicly reveal that, something that high level.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Well, so what’s your suggestion? That they invented the source, or what’s your-?

AARON MATE: My suggestion is it’s quite possible that, given the legacy of U.S. intelligence officials inventing intelligence to fix, to comport with political imperatives whatever they are, whether it’s the Iraq War, whether it’s allegations against any number of official U.S. enemies, that that may have happened here. And I’m just urging skepticism in the absence of evidence that we obviously disagree on whether it has been presented yet.

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Doesn’t look like we will ever see proof.

• Putin Rejects UK’s ‘Ungrounded Accusations’ Over Novichok Poisoning (AFP)

Vladimir Putin has accused Britain of making baseless allegations against Russia over the former Soviet spy and three other people poisoned, one fatally, with the novichok nerve agent in Salisbury. Asked in a Fox News interview about the British government’s assertion that Moscow was behind the novichok attack on the former spy Sergei Skripal, Putin said London had not provided any evidence to back up the claim. “We would like to get documentary evidence but nobody gives it to us,” Putin, speaking through a translator, told the US network after a summit with Donald Trump in Finland.

“It’s the same thing with the accusations of meddling in the election process in America,” he added in reference to claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election which was won by Trump. Putin suggested the case could be driven by domestic issues in Britain, saying: “Nobody wants to look into these.” “We just see the ungrounded accusations – why is it done this way? Why should our relationship be made worse by this?” The former Russian double agent Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed in Salisbury on 4 March after being exposed to novichok. Both have since recovered. On 30 June Charlie Rowley and his partner Dawn Sturgess fell ill not far from the Skripal attack after being exposed to the same nerve agent. Sturgess died on 8 July.

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Referred to the police. What are they going to do with this? At what point does the whole vote get nullified?

• Vote Leave Fined For Breaking Electoral Law (BBC)

Brexit campaign group Vote Leave has been fined £61,000 and referred to the police after an Electoral Commission probe said it broke electoral law. The investigation found “significant evidence of joint working” between the group and another organisation – BeLeave – leading to it exceeding its spending limit by almost £500,000. Vote Leave also returned an “incomplete and inaccurate spending report”, with almost £234,501 reported incorrectly, and invoices missing for £12,849.99 of spending, the watchdog said. BeLeave founder Darren Grimes has also been fined and referred to the police for breaking the group’s spending limit by more than £665,000 and wrongly reporting the spending as his own.

Veterans for Britain were also found to have inaccurately reported a donation it received from Vote Leave and has been fined £250. Bob Posner, from the Electoral Commission, said: “The Electoral Commission has followed the evidence and conducted a thorough investigation into spending and campaigning carried out by Vote Leave and BeLeave. “We found substantial evidence that the two groups worked to a common plan, did not declare their joint working and did not adhere to the legal spending limits. These are serious breaches of the laws put in place by Parliament to ensure fairness and transparency at elections and referendums.”

He added: “Vote Leave has resisted our investigation from the start, including contesting our right as the statutory regulator to open the investigation. It has refused to cooperate, refused our requests to put forward a representative for interview, and forced us to use our legal powers to compel it to provide evidence. “Nevertheless, the evidence we have found is clear and substantial, and can now be seen in our report.”

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Like a full-time contortionist.

• May Narrowly Heads Off Defeat After Caving In To Brexit Hardliners (G.)

Theresa May has narrowly seen off a Commons rebellion from Conservative remainers unhappy that she had caved in to hardline Brexiters by accepting their amendments to the customs bill. The government majority was reduced to just three votes on the two most controversial amendments after leading Tory remainer Anna Soubry complained that the prime minister had lost control of events by making concessions to the rightwing European Research Group of MPs. The most important of the four amendments from the ERG, chaired by Jacob Rees-Mogg, had been designed to frustrate May’s compromise proposals over customs arrangements and had initially been opposed by the government, until Downing Street made a sudden U-turn in the afternoon.

No 10 then concluded that all four amendments were “consistent with the Brexit white paper”, a decision that so incensed Tory remainers they vowed to vote against the amendments in Monday night’s Commons debate. One junior minister, Guto Bebb, resigned rather than support the ERG customs union amendment, which narrowly passed by 305 to 302. A total of 14 Tory remainers voted against the government, while three Labour MPs and former Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins voted the other way. A second ERG amendment, preventing the UK joining in with the EU’s VAT regime post-Brexit, passed 303 to 300.

A frustrated Soubry had told the Commons: “The only reason that the government has accepted these amendments is because it is frightened of somewhere in the region of 40 members of parliament – the hard, no-deal Brexiteers, who should have been seen off a long time ago and should be seen off.”

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Nice metaphor.

• Brexit Is Like The Python That Swallowed An Alligator (Ind.)

About a year ago, I described the passage of Brexit through parliament as being like that regularly reappearing photograph of a Burmese python that tried to swallow a six-foot alligator whole and accidentally exploded. The alligator suffocated, the python’s head got blown off. That much is not contested. But apart from that, no one knows quite what happened in the hours before an amateur photographer chanced upon it. We must presume the alligator struggled til the last, and that is the stage of Brexit at which we have now arrived. Parliament embraced Brexit of its own free will, but now it cannot handle the monster coming down its oesophagus. And the monster itself does not want to die.

More than a year on from triggering Article 50, the point at which the teeth of the two beast’s teeth first touched, Theresa May had hoped she had found a way of easing its passage that might keep both alive. The so-called “Chequers deal”, which is not a deal at all but an agreed position among the cabinet, detonated the cabinet within moments of it being agreed to. None of which engages with the fact that the European Union was highly likely to reject the agreement anyway. David Davis has quit. Boris Johnson has quit. Justine Greening, the former education secretary who quit in January, has said the only way forward is a second referendum with three choices on the ballot paper (hard Brexit, no Brexit, or the least damaging Brexit the government can manage to get).

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No there there.

• Theresa May Told Her Chequers Deal Is ‘Dead In The Water’ (Ind.)

Theresa May has faced taunts that her Chequers deal is “dead in the water” after caving in to a series of changes to customs rules demanded by pro-hard Brexit Tories. Plans for the UK to collect duties for the EU – which lie at the heart of the prime minister’s hopes for a deal with Brussels – will only go forward if the EU in turn agrees to collect them for the UK. There appears to be no prospect of the EU bowing to such a request, apparently throwing the hard-fought Chequers proposals up in the air after just 10 days. In the Commons, Ms May was accused of “dancing to the tune of the European Research Group” – the 60-80 strong organisation of Brexiteer MPs led by Jacob Rees-Mogg.

“By capitulating to their proposals on the Customs and [the] Trade Bill she is accepting that the Chequers deal is now dead in the water,” said Labour MP Stephen Kinnock. Ms May insisted he was “absolutely wrong”, telling MPs: “I would not have gone through all the work that I did to ensure that we reached that agreement only to see it changed in some way through these bills. They do not change that Chequers agreement.” Nevertheless, the Brexit white paper – published only four days ago – appeared to rule out a requirement for the EU to agree reciprocal arrangements. It said the two sides would have to “agree a mechanism for the remittance of relevant tariff revenue”, but added: “The UK is not proposing that the EU applies the UK’s tariffs and trade policy at its border for goods intended for the UK.”

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Disturbing.

• IRS To Revoke 362,000 Passports From US Citizens (Black)

About two and a half years ago, I told you about a particularly nasty piece of legislation that President Obama quietly signed into law towards the end of his administration. They called it the “FAST Act”, which stood for Fixing America’s Surface Transportation. Yet despite $300 billion earmarked for infrastructure repairs, they didn’t manage to fix very much of America’s surface transportation. The legislation did, however, have two major effects: 1) The FAST Act authorized the US government to plunder excess capital from the Federal Reserve… which is about as stupid as thing as anyone could possibly do. The Federal Reserve is America’s central bank; they control the value and fate of the US dollar… which is still the most dominant currency in the world.

You’d think that having some excess cash on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet would be viewed as wise and conservative. But not Congress. These guys are so broke, they’ll grab every penny they can get. Even from their own central bank. So they buried a provision into the FAST Act demanding that the Federal Reserve hand over any excess capital to the Treasury Department at the end of every calendar year. They started doing that almost immediately, in December 2015. And in 2016. And in 2017. This is one of the reasons why, to this day, the Federal Reserve is borderline insolvent… which hardly inspires confidence. Now, I could go on for quite some time about what an idiotic idea this was. But believe it or not, there was an even worse section of the FAST Act– one they only started implementing recently:

2) Section 32101 of the FAST Act required the US State Department to revoke or deny the passport of any taxpayer that the IRS deems to have “seriously delinquent tax debt.” They define seriously delinquent tax debt as owing $50,000 or more. Well, it took them a couple of years, but the IRS has finally started enforcing this law. Earlier this month the IRS acknowledged that they had sent at least 362,000 names to the State Department to start revoking or denying passports. And that’s just the beginning. The IRS is sending these names out ‘in batches’, so there will be many more to follow. They hope to be finished by the end of the year.

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Washington DC, capital of cash.

• Going Cashless Is Discriminatory (G.)

Mobile payments. Credit cards. Digital currencies. Going cashless seems to be a worldwide trend. In Belgium, it is illegal to buy real estate with cash. Some banks in Australia have eliminated cash from their branches. Sweden has seen its use of cash drop to less than 2% of all transactions, and the number could be heading even lower in the next few years. However, one city in the US is resisting that trend: Washington DC. In the nation’s capital cash is still king, and a new bill introduced this week wants to keep it that way. The Cashless Retailers Prohibition Act of 2018 would make it illegal for restaurants and retailers not to accept cash or charge a different price to customers depending on the type of payment they use.

City councilmember David Grasso, and five other councilmembers who co-introduced the bill, are responding to the recent tide of retailers in their city and around the country – like the salad chain Sweetgreen – who are no longer accepting cash. These retailers, which mostly serve upscale customers, say that going cashless speeds up transactions, improves customer service and makes for more accurate accounting. They also argue that having less cash lying around also minimizes the risk of crime and contributes to a safer environment for both their customers and employees.

But to some, not accepting cash is discriminatory. A report last year by the Washington City Paper found that 27% of people in the US would have trouble using only a credit card to purchase products, and that the percentage in Washington DC is even higher. “I’m concerned with more and more restaurants, businesses and shops going cashless because you’re systematically excluding a group of people who are already disadvantaged and disenfranchised,” Linnea Lassiter, an analyst at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, told the paper. “And now they can’t have access to this restaurant?”

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When growth slows…

• Netflix Stock Slammed As Subscriber Growth And Revenue Fall Short (MW)

Netflix posted weaker-than-expected second-quarter revenue and subscriber numbers Monday afternoon, sending its stock into a sharp dive during after-hours trading. Netflix shares fell about 14% in the extended session after the Los Gatos, Calif-based company announced it added 5.2 million streaming users in the second quarter, a substantial drop from the 6.2 million estimate the company provided in April. The company added 4.47 million international subscribers and 670,000 domestic subscribers, missing its April estimates of 5.9 million and 1.2 million.

The company reported a profit of $384 million, or 85 cents a share, topping the FactSet consensus of 79 cents a share and up from $66 million, or 15 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue rose to $3.91 billion from $2.79 billion the year before, just below the FactSet consensus of $3.94 billion. In a letter to shareholders, Netflix said the company had a “strong but not stellar” quarter, acknowledging the company had “over-forecasted” both domestic and global net subscriber additions and “acquisition growth was lower than we projected.”

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Doesn’t feel like the EU actually identifies the danger to society.

• Airbnb Warned It Breaches EU Rules Over Pricing Policy (G.)

Airbnb has been found in breach of EU law and given until the end of the summer to ditch a range of practices, including that of belatedly applying additional fees to the prices it promotes online. The accommodation service has been accused by the European commission and national regulators of failing its customers and making the mistake of many global digital firms of “forgetting its responsibilities”. Vera Jourova, the commissioner for justice and consumers, told reporters in Brussels that the company had until the end of August to show it was reforming its ways or it could expect national regulators across Europe to launch coordinated action.

The commissioner said the prices displayed to those using the Airbnb website fail to reflect the fees and charges later passed on to the consumer, including cleaning costs. The site did not clearly identify if the offer of accommodation was being made by amateur hosts or professionals. The issue is important because the level of consumer rights differ according to the status of the owner, as do the health and safety requirements. The commissioner said Airbnb’s terms and conditions were unclear. She also said the company should put an end to its policy of seeking to tackle legal complaints made by its clients in courts outside the country where the complainant resides.

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Maybe the government can make a deal with Airbnb.

• High Housing Costs Prompt Thousands of Greeks To Disclaim Inheritance (K.)

Thousands of properties are coming into the state’s possession not because they’re bogged down in debt, but simply because the people who inherit them are opting to give up the titles. According to real estate experts, more than 135,000 inheritances were disclaimed in 2017, because the beneficiaries were unable to pay the inheritance tax or they found the future financial demands of the property unbearable. The slump in the real estate market, in combination with the fact that many properties are suffering from neglect, meanwhile, are making it even harder for those who may be hoping to find a buyer before accepting their inheritance.

“Property has become a burden,” says Babis Haralambopoulos, a certified valuer, scientific consultant to Solum Property Solutions and former president of the Hellenic Valuation Institute. “Since the start of the crisis, residential properties have shed an average of 45 percent of their value, while there’s a trend toward stabilization right now.” Meanwhile, recent data from Eurostat showed that Greece had the highest housing costs as a percentage of disposable income among the European Union’s member-states. In 2016, the proportion of Greek households that spent more than 40 percent of their disposable income on housing costs came to 40.5 percent, which is almost four times the EU average of 11.1 percent.

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